Gold Silver Ledger's spot feed is built to refresh once a minute, every market session, without you needing to think about it. Most of the time, it does.
Occasionally — for reasons that can sit anywhere between our infrastructure and the broader internet — a refresh doesn't land on schedule, and the app surfaces that fact with an amber stale price indicator rather than pretending nothing happened.
This article is a short read on when that indicator shows up, what it means, and what to do about it.
The headline up front: you almost certainly won't see this very often, and when you do, it almost always clears itself in a minute or two.
What the warning looks like
When a metal's spot feed has gone unrefreshed for longer than expected during a trading session, the app shows a small amber indicator beside that metal's spot value — most visibly on the four spot cards on the Dashboard. The number itself still appears, but with the visual flag attached that says, in effect, we last fetched this a little while ago and haven't been able to confirm a fresher quote.
The indicator is metal-specific. If gold's feed has stalled but silver, platinum, and palladium are all refreshing normally, only gold's card carries the warning.
What triggers it
The warning appears when the most recent successful spot fetch for a given metal is more than a few minutes old during an active trading session. The expected cadence is once per minute (see [How often spot prices update]), so a gap of several minutes is a meaningful enough departure to be worth flagging.
Things that can produce a gap that long are rare and generally short-lived:
A transient hiccup in our background fetcher: A retry resolves it on the next cycle.
A brief outage or rate-limit pause at the data source: Resolves when the source is back.
A short network interruption between our infrastructure and the source: Resolves when connectivity restores.
None of these tend to last long, and none of them affect the data you've already recorded — your transactions, your inventory, your locked-in spot-at-time values, your historical reports.
What the warning doesn't mean
A few clarifications on what the indicator is not signalling.
It doesn't mean the price on screen is wrong: The displayed number is the most recent quote we successfully fetched. It's accurate as of that fetch — it just isn't necessarily current to the second.
It doesn't mean your data is corrupted or missing: Stale spot is a live-feed issue, not a stored-data issue. Everything you've entered remains intact and unchanged.
It doesn't mean you need to do anything immediately: Live spot is used for valuation; it doesn't gate any action you might want to take in the app.
It doesn't mean markets are closed: Weekend and holiday closures don't trigger the warning. Those are expected absences; this is an unexpected one. See How often spot prices update for the read on legitimate closures.
What to do
Almost always, the right answer is "wait." A typical stale-price episode resolves on its own within one or two refresh cycles — meaning a minute or two — once the next successful fetch lands.
If you're checking the app and want a quick read on whether you can proceed:
You can still record transactions while the warning is showing: The app uses the most recently fetched spot as the spot-at-time on a new buy or sell. If the spot is a few minutes old, the transaction will lock in a spot that's a few minutes off the live market. For most users on most days, that's close enough to current that it doesn't matter — and for users who want to be precise about it, the spot-at-time field on a transaction is editable.
Your portfolio value is being computed against the most recent fetch: A few-minute lag won't change the picture materially. The headline numbers stay close to right.
If the warning is still showing an hour later: That's outside the normal range. Worth a quick check of the [Status page] or, if nothing's flagged there, a note to support. See Contact support.
Why we show the warning at all
It would be technically simple to suppress the indicator and just keep showing the last-known price as if nothing were unusual. We don't, because we'd rather be transparent about the state of the data than silently confident.
The cost of showing the indicator is small: a moment of "huh, what's that amber dot" on your first encounter, and then a minute of waiting on the rare occasions it persists.
The benefit is that you always know whether the number in front of you is a fresh quote or a slightly aged one — and on the rare days that distinction matters to a decision you're about to make, you have it.
In short: the warning is the kind of small honesty that comes free with software that doesn't try to hide its rough edges.
How the warning differs from a quiet market
Worth restating, because the two states can look superficially similar — both involve spot prices not moving.
Stale price warning (this article): Unexpected. Indicator shown. Almost always brief.
Weekend / holiday / settlement-window quiet: Expected. No indicator. Prices hold at the last quote until trading resumes.
If you open the app on a Saturday and notice the values haven't ticked since Friday, that's the quiet-market case — no warning will appear, because nothing is wrong. See How often spot prices update for the timeline of legitimate closures.
Where to go next
How often spot prices update: The cadence the warning is measuring against.
Where our spot prices come from: Where the feed sources sit upstream.
[Bid, ask, and mid prices]: What each part of a quote means.