Well, that's the thing and a tricky one for the physically-deliverables...Where would you actually go to buy or sell something at a spot price? I remember about 12 years ago I had some 20 carat gold jewelry I wanted to sell, so went to a local jeweler. He tested it, weighed it, and then looked up what the current gold price was. (What benchmark he used I do not know.) But the fact that he looked it up in the first place leads me to believe that he was looking at the spot price, probably London. So that day I got whatever price the market was at, at the time of his quote lookup. The only "premium" I paid was the cost the jeweler deducted for their expenses of melting, etc. If you wanted to BUY an ounce of gold? I have no idea where you would go to just BUY a 1-oz chunk of 24K gold on that day. With the CME in GC futures, they have designated locations for the physical transaction to take place at contract delivery date.
CL is even weirder. Where do you go to buy 1 barrel of crude TODAY? Who knows. But like GC, if you allow your CL future contract to expire and become deliverable/purchaseable, my understanding is that you have to travel to Cushing, OK with your truck to either take delivery, or pump it into their tanks, depending upon your contract side. Of course, on full-sized CL contracts, yer talking 1,000 barrels, or 42,000 gallons. With full-sized GC, it's 100 oz of gold.
So in essence, is there really a premium on the "spot" purchase of CL or GC? Well, there probably is, on the sellers' markups so they can make profit on the trade.
