If you've spotted an amber stale indicator next to one of the spot prices on your Dashboard, the short answer is: it's almost certainly nothing.
The spot feed has fallen a little behind its usual once-per-minute cadence, the app is being honest about that fact rather than hiding it, and within a minute or two the next successful fetch will land and the indicator will quietly disappear.
You shouldn't see this very often. Most users go weeks or months without encountering it. But when something on the feed side does go briefly sideways, the indicator is how the app tells you — which is more useful than the alternative of silently pretending nothing happened.
This article is the short, action-focused version for the moments when you actually see one. For the deeper "what is this and why does it exist" version, see The "stale price" warning explained.
How rare is rare?
The spot feed is built to refresh once per minute, every minute, every trading session. The overwhelming majority of the time, it does exactly that. A stale indicator appearing at all is the exception — it generally means a brief upstream wobble or a short network hiccup in the pipeline that fetches prices.
That's worth keeping in mind for context: if you're seeing the indicator and bracing for a longer outage, you almost certainly don't need to. Most stale episodes resolve themselves on the very next refresh cycle.
What the indicator actually means
A stale flag on a metal's spot card means: "The most recent successful price fetch for this metal is older than the normal refresh window — we're showing you the last good quote, and we'll replace it as soon as the next one lands."
A few things it's deliberately not signalling:
It's not saying the price on screen is wrong. The number you're looking at is a real, recently fetched quote. It's just not as fresh as the one we'd normally have at this point in the minute.
It's not saying your data is at risk. Stale spot is a live-feed condition. Your transactions, holdings, recorded spot-at-purchase values, and reports are all stored separately and aren't touched.
It's not saying markets are closed. Weekend and holiday closures don't trigger the indicator at all — those are expected absences and the app just holds the previous quote without comment. The stale flag specifically marks an unexpected gap during an active session. For the calendar of legitimate closures, see How often spot prices update.
If the indicator is showing on one metal but not the other three, that's also normal — feeds are tracked per metal, and a hiccup on one doesn't imply anything is wrong with the others.
What to do
In nearly every case, wait. That's the whole answer.
A typical stale episode clears itself within one or two refresh cycles — meaning a minute, maybe two. If you can come back to the Dashboard in a few minutes, the indicator will usually be gone and the price will have ticked forward to a current quote.
While you wait, you can keep using the app as normal:
You can still record transactions. New buys and sells use the most recently fetched spot as the spot-at-time. If that spot is a couple of minutes old, the transaction will lock in a value that's a couple of minutes off the live market — for most stackers on most days, well within the noise of dealer pricing anyway. And the spot-at-time field on a transaction is editable if you want to dial it in more precisely. See Recorded spot vs. live spot.
Your portfolio value is still valid. It's being computed against the most recent successful fetch. A few-minute lag won't shift the picture materially.
Nothing on the Holdings, Analytics, or Reports pages stops working. Live valuation continues against the last known price; everything else (transactions, premiums, sold history) is independent of the live feed entirely.
In other words: the indicator is information, not friction. The app keeps doing its job while it's there.
You can trust the indicator to show up if anything is wrong
One thing worth saying explicitly, because it changes how you should read everything else: if the spot feed ever runs into a real problem, the stale indicator is the way you'll know. We don't paper over feed issues. If a fetch fails or falls behind, the indicator goes up — visibly, in amber, right next to the affected metal.
The practical implication is that you don't have to worry about silently bad prices. If the Dashboard shows no indicator, the price you're looking at is current. If something has gone wrong with the feed, you'll see the flag.
If it's still showing after an hour
Persistent stale state — the indicator still up sixty minutes later, across more than one refresh cycle, with no sign of recovery — is the edge case. It can happen if a feed source has a longer outage than usual, or if something in our infrastructure needs human attention.
If you ever land in that situation:
Check [Status page]. Confirmed feed and infrastructure issues are posted there. If something is acknowledged, the page will say so and there's nothing to send us — we already know.
If nothing is flagged on the status page, let us know. [Contact support] has the current contact path. A quick note saying which metal is stale and roughly how long the indicator has been up is plenty to start with.
You don't need to wait an hour to act — that's just the rough threshold for "this is no longer routine." If something looks unmistakably stuck and you'd rather flag it earlier, that's fine too.
What you don't need to do
A few things people sometimes try when they see the indicator that don't help and aren't necessary:
You don't need to refresh the page repeatedly. The fetch happens in the background on a schedule, not when you reload. Refreshing five times in a row produces no extra fetches; it just produces five renders of the same page.
You don't need to re-record any transactions. Spot-at-purchase on existing transactions is locked in from the time of entry — it doesn't get retroactively "fixed" by the feed catching up, and it doesn't need to.
You don't need to clear cache or sign out and back in. Stale state is server-side data freshness, not browser-side cache. Local browser actions can't change it.
The only useful action is patience. The second-most-useful is checking the status page or pinging support if patience runs out.
Where to go next
The "stale price" warning explained: The deeper explainer — what triggers the indicator, why it's transparent rather than silent, and how it differs from a quiet market.
How often spot prices update: The cadence the indicator is measuring against, plus the calendar of expected market closures.
Recorded spot vs. live spot: Why old transactions don't tick with live spot, and why a brief stale window doesn't disturb your existing records.
[Status page]: Where to check for confirmed feed issues before contacting us.