Every number Gold Silver Ledger shows you that depends on the current market — your portfolio value, your unrealized gain or loss, the four spot cards on the Dashboard — traces back to the live spot prices we pull in from the markets.
This article is the plain-language version of where those numbers come from, how often they refresh, and what we do to keep them honest.
What "spot price" means here
A spot price is the per-troy-ounce price at which the metal is trading right now, for immediate settlement, in the major wholesale markets. It's the reference benchmark dealers quote against when they sell you a coin or a bar, and it's the same number you'll see on financial news feeds covering precious metals.
The app uses spot for two things, and only two:
Valuing your held inventory: Current market value = weight × current spot, applied at render time.
Recording the spot at the moment of a transaction: Locked into each buy or sell when you save it, so the premium you paid or received is preserved against the spot at that time. See [Why your spot price is locked in at the time of purchase].
Spot isn't a retail price — that's spot plus a dealer premium. The premium analysis in the app tracks the gap between the two for every purchase you record.
The sources we draw from
Spot quotes are aggregated from the primary venues where wholesale precious metals trade, including:
COMEX (CME Group): Futures-derived spot for gold and silver, the most-watched US benchmark.
NYMEX (CME Group): Futures-derived spot for platinum and palladium.
LBMA (London Bullion Market Association): Internationally referenced physical-bullion benchmarks for gold and silver, set in London.
OTC interbank quotes: Real-time bid / ask quotes from major liquidity providers in the over-the-counter market.
We compute a continuously refreshed mid-market price from a weighted aggregation of these inputs, with basic anomaly filtering to discard quotes that drift implausibly far from the aggregate.
The point of pulling from multiple venues rather than a single source is robustness: a single feed can hiccup; an aggregate is hard to knock off-course.
The four metals we track
Gold Silver Ledger tracks the four physical precious metals that have liquid, exchange-traded spot markets:
Gold: Quoted in USD per troy ounce. Most-followed benchmark, deepest market.
Silver: Quoted in USD per troy ounce. Higher day-to-day volatility than gold; more sensitive to industrial demand.
Platinum: Quoted in USD per troy ounce. Thinner market, wider bid-ask spreads.
Palladium: Quoted in USD per troy ounce. The thinnest of the four, and the most volatile.
If you're holding something the app doesn't natively track — rhodium, ruthenium, iridium, or any of the other minor precious metals — the catalog and custom-product flow doesn't currently cover them. The decision to track four rather than seven is about which markets have benchmark-quality spot feeds; the niche metals don't.
How often the prices refresh
During market hours, the spot prices in the app refresh roughly once per minute. The four-metal feed updates in the background continuously — you don't have to refresh the page to see new prices land; the app picks them up the next time it renders a value.
A few practical implications:
The Dashboard spot cards reflect the most recent fetch: Open the Dashboard at 3:02 and 3:03 in a moving market and the numbers will have ticked. See [A tour of your dashboard].
Recorded transactions don't move with spot: Once a transaction is saved, the spot at the time of the transaction is locked in. Live spot only drives the current value side of the picture.
A stale-price indicator appears if the feed pauses: If the last successful fetch falls behind by more than a few minutes, you'll see an amber warning on the affected metal. See [The "stale price" warning explained].
The roughly-one-minute cadence is the user-facing refresh rate. The underlying market quotes themselves change on a sub-second basis in liquid markets — what the app surfaces is a sampled snapshot, which is more than enough resolution for tracking long-term physical holdings.
Bid, ask, and mid
Every spot quote actually carries three numbers:
Bid: The price a market maker will buy at right now.
Ask: The price a market maker will sell at right now.
Mid: Halfway between the two — the neutral reference number.
Gold Silver Ledger uses mid for every spot-based calculation in the app: the values on your Dashboard, the spot-at-time recorded on your transactions, the premium analysis on Analytics. Using mid keeps everything internally consistent and matches how most public spot-price quotes are presented.
For the deeper read on why we picked mid and what bid / ask are useful for, see [Bid, ask, and mid prices].
Market hours
Precious metals markets trade nearly continuously through the trading week, with one daily pause and a longer weekend closure.
Weekday trading: Gold, silver, platinum, and palladium futures trade roughly 23 hours per day, Sunday evening through Friday afternoon (US time), with a brief daily settlement break in the late afternoon US time.
Weekend closure: Markets are closed from Friday evening through Sunday evening. Spot prices don't update during this window.
Public holidays: A handful of US market holidays each year close the futures venues for the day. The London benchmarks may or may not publish on those days depending on the calendar.
If you open the app on a Saturday morning, the spot prices you see are the last quotes from the Friday close — which is normal, not stale. See [How often spot prices update] for the full read on cadences and quiet hours.
USD at the source
Every spot price reaches the app in USD per troy ounce — that's the underlying market convention, regardless of where you live or what currency you've set as your display. If your display currency is EUR or GBP or CAD, the value you see on the Dashboard is the USD spot price converted at the live FX rate at render time.
This is the same storage-vs-display split we use everywhere in the app: prices are stored in USD, and translation to your local currency happens at the moment of display. See [How currency conversion works].
Where to go next
[How often spot prices update]: Refresh cadence and quiet-market hours in more detail.
[The "stale price" warning explained]: What triggers it and what to do.
[Bid, ask, and mid prices]: Why we use mid and what bid / ask are useful for.
[How currency conversion works]: The USD-stored, display-converted model.