Chinese banks shut down retail trading services for precious metals

The Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, the world’s largest bank by assets, will fully cease individual precious metals trading on July 24, 2026. It’s not alone. A growing list of major Chinese banks is systematically dismantling the infrastructure that once let millions of retail investors speculate on gold and silver prices.

What’s actually happening

ICBC announced the suspension on June 25, 2026, giving customers roughly a month to wind down positions.

Postal Savings Bank of China, Ping An Bank, and China Guangfa Bank have all adopted similar measures. The pattern is consistent across institutions: halt new account openings, close dormant accounts, refund idle margins, and ratchet up the cost of staying in.

Margin requirements on some products have been raised as high as 140%. For context, that means a retail trader needs to put up $1.40 in collateral for every dollar of exposure.

New retail accounts linked to the Shanghai Gold Exchange have been paused since late 2020. By December 2025, banks including ICBC and China Construction Bank began actively closing dormant accounts and returning unused margin funds.

Why now, and why this aggressively

Gold surged to approximately $5,600 per ounce earlier this year. Then it plummeted below $4,000 per ounce by June, driven by a strengthening US dollar and shifting market conditions. That’s a drawdown of nearly 30% in a matter of months.

Chinese regulators have seen this movie before. The 2020 “Crude Oil Treasure” crisis remains a scar on the country’s financial system. Bank of China’s crude oil-linked product imploded when oil futures went negative in April 2020, leaving retail investors owing money they never expected to lose.

The current restrictions on precious metals trading are a direct descendant of that crisis. Regulators and state-owned banks started restricting retail access to leveraged gold trading almost immediately after, beginning in late 2020.

What this means for investors

The immediate impact on physical gold demand in China appears limited. Investors can still buy gold bars, coins, and jewelry. Institutional trading channels remain open. The Shanghai Gold Exchange itself isn’t going anywhere.

What’s disappearing is the speculative layer — the leveraged products that let retail investors make outsized bets on price movements without actually owning any metal.

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