The spot prices on your Dashboard, the live values on your Holdings page, and the per-metal numbers on Analytics all draw from the same continuously refreshed feed.
This article explains how often the feed updates, what you should expect to see during the various quiet windows in the trading week, and why one-minute resolution is the cadence we settled on.
The short version
Spot prices in Gold Silver Ledger refresh once per minute during market hours, for all four metals simultaneously. Outside market hours — overnight settlement windows, weekends, and a handful of public holidays — the prices hold at the most recent quote from before the close.
The rest of this article is the detail underneath that one sentence.
What "during market hours" means
The major futures venues that supply the spot feed run nearly continuously through the trading week:
Sunday 6:00 PM ET through Friday 5:00 PM ET: The COMEX and NYMEX precious-metals contracts are open, with a brief daily settlement break (see below).
Friday 5:00 PM ET through Sunday 6:00 PM ET: Weekend closure. Markets are not trading; spot prices don't update.
Public holidays: A handful of US market holidays each year close the futures venues for the day. The London-based benchmarks may or may not publish, depending on the holiday.
Within an open trading session, the feed refreshes every minute. So at 10:31 AM ET on a Tuesday, the spot you see is the quote sampled at or just after 10:31; at 10:32, the new sample arrives.
What you see between refreshes
The app holds the most recent fetched quote until the next refresh lands. Between minute-marks, the numbers on screen aren't ticking sub-second the way a futures trader's terminal does — they're the as-of-last-minute snapshot, sitting still until the next one comes in.
There's no interpolation or smoothing between samples. If gold trades at $4,712 at 10:31:00 and $4,718 at 10:32:00, the app shows $4,712 from 10:31 through 10:31:59 and then jumps to $4,718 at the next render after 10:32.
For physical-holdings tracking, the lack of intra-minute movement is a feature, not a limitation — see the "Why one minute" section below.
How the refresh shows up in the app
The fetch runs in the background, on the server side, on its own schedule. You don't trigger it, you don't reload the page for it, and you don't see a spinner. When a new quote lands:
The four Dashboard spot cards display the new value the next time the Dashboard renders. The cards live only on the Dashboard — see A tour of your dashboard.
Holdings values recompute against the new spot when you next view the Holdings page or refresh it.
Analytics charts and cards pull the new spot when you load or refresh that page.
If you're sitting on the same page for several minutes, you may or may not see the values tick depending on whether the page subscribes to live updates or only refreshes on navigation. Either way, navigating away and back is enough to pull the latest.
Weekend and holiday behaviour
When markets are closed, spot prices in the app hold at the last quote from before the close. That's not a malfunction — it's the correct behaviour, because there is no live market to sample.
A few practical notes:
Friday evening through Sunday evening (US time): The numbers you see Friday at midnight, Saturday afternoon, and early Sunday morning will be identical. They're the Friday close.
Major US public holidays: Spot prices hold at the last quote from the previous trading day. Trading resumes the next business day and refreshes pick up from there.
Trading reopens Sunday evening: When the Asian market session begins, the feed resumes and the first new quote of the week lands on your Dashboard at the next render after that fetch.
If you open the app at 9 AM on a Saturday and notice the values haven't moved since Friday, that's expected. Spot doesn't move when no one is trading.
The daily settlement window
Each weekday, the futures venues take a short break — typically around 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM ET — for daily settlement and a hand-off between trading sessions. The feed pauses during this window, the same way it pauses on weekends, just for a much shorter interval.
For most users this window is invisible — it's the dinner hour on the US East Coast, and most people aren't checking spot. If you do happen to be looking at the app at exactly that time and notice the prices stop ticking, the trading session is what's on a break, not the app.
Why one minute is the right resolution
The underlying futures markets quote on a sub-second timescale: every fraction of a second, new bid / ask pairs arrive from the order book.
We could, in principle, sample that more frequently. We don't, because for tracking physical bullion holdings the extra resolution doesn't earn its keep.
A few reasons:
Physical positions don't reprice second-by-second: You can't actually buy or sell a coin at the exact instant of a tick. Premium-bearing physical purchases happen at retail, on dealer time, in human increments.
A one-minute sample captures every meaningful move: Even in a sharp market, a one-minute lag means a fraction of a percent of value drift in the worst case — much smaller than the day-to-day premium variance most stackers care about.
Sub-minute refreshes would add noise without signal: Watching gold flicker between $4,712.40 and $4,712.50 every two seconds isn't information; it's distraction.
A predictable cadence is easier to reason about: Once-per-minute is a number you can hold in your head. "Sub-second when the server feels like it" isn't.
So the one-minute cadence is deliberate — slow enough to be calm, fast enough that anything you'd want to know about a price move shows up before you've finished refreshing the page.
Where to go next
Where our spot prices come from: The sources behind the feed.
[The "stale price" warning explained]: What happens if the feed falls behind during a trading session.
[Bid, ask, and mid prices]: Why we use the mid price and what bid / ask are for.
A tour of your dashboard: Where the live spot cards live.