The spot price on my Dashboard differs from what I see elsewhere

If you've glanced at a quote site, a dealer's homepage, or a charting app and noticed its spot price is a few dollars off from the one on your Gold Silver Ledger Dashboard, that's almost always expected.

There isn't a single canonical "spot" number that every service in the world quotes to the cent. Different services pull from different upstreams, sample at different intervals, quote in different units, and round in slightly different ways — and any one of those choices can put a small wedge between two otherwise legitimate quotes.

This article walks through the reasons that wedge exists and how to figure out which one is in play.

Two reputable spot-price sources looking at the same market at the same moment will usually agree to within a few dollars on gold and a few cents on silver.

That's normal. A larger or persistent gap usually points to one specific cause from the list below — most often a currency or per-unit mismatch, or a bid-vs-ask difference — and once you spot it, the gap stops looking mysterious.

The most common cause of small disagreements is which side of the spread the other service is showing.

Live markets quote two prices for every metal at any given moment: a bid (the highest price buyers are currently willing to pay) and an ask (the lowest price sellers are currently willing to accept).

The difference between them is the spread — usually a few dollars on gold, a few cents on silver. The mid price is just the midpoint between bid and ask.

Gold Silver Ledger uses the mid price on the Dashboard. It's the most neutral single number — neither the buy side nor the sell side, just the centre. Other services pick differently:

So if a dealer page shows gold at $4,696 and your Dashboard shows $4,700, the gap may be entirely accounted for by the bid-versus-mid difference.

Look for whether the other service labels its number as bid, ask, or mid; the label is usually somewhere on the page in small print. The deeper explainer is in Bid, ask, and mid prices.

If the other service is showing a number in USD and your Gold Silver Ledger Dashboard is showing the same metal in EUR, GBP, AUD, or any of the other supported display currencies, the two numbers are quoting the same underlying market in different units. They will never match — they're not trying to.

This sounds obvious written down, but it catches people more often than you'd guess, especially:

The check is quick: confirm what currency the other site is showing, and confirm what currency your Gold Silver Ledger profile is set to. If they don't match, the numbers can't either. To compare apples to apples, switch the Dashboard to the same currency for a moment — see Choosing your display currency.

The second-most-embarrassing-once-you-notice-it cause. Gold Silver Ledger quotes per troy ounce. Many international sites — particularly those serving European and Asian audiences — quote per gram.

A troy ounce is roughly 31.1 grams. So if a site shows gold at $151 per gram and your Dashboard shows $4,700 per troy ounce, those are the same price: 151 × 31.1 ≈ $4,696. The numbers look wildly different because the units are different.

When in doubt, look for the per-unit label on the other site (usually "/g" for gram, "/oz" or "/ozt" for troy ounce). If you see "/g," divide your Dashboard price by 31.1 before comparing; or multiply theirs by 31.1 before comparing the other way.

A briefer trap: a regular ounce (avoirdupois, used in everyday US measurements) and a troy ounce are slightly different. Precious metals are essentially always quoted in troy ounces, but if any site you're consulting talks about plain "ounces" without specifying, it's worth confirming which one they mean.

There is no single global exchange where every spot trade clears. The spot price you see anywhere is an aggregation or selection from several venues, and different aggregators select differently.

Some services pull primarily from US futures venues. Some lean on the London-based benchmarks. Some blend both, sometimes with their own weighting.

On any given second, those venues are slightly out of sync with each other — usually by a few dollars at most, but enough to put a small wedge between any two services that happen to be looking at different mixes.

This is a real, structural reason for small differences, and it doesn't mean any of the sources are wrong. It means the underlying market is, in a small way, several markets.

Gold Silver Ledger's spot is drawn from major precious-metals trading sources via a live feed. See Where our spot prices come from for the general shape of where the numbers originate.

Spot prices move continuously. Gold Silver Ledger refreshes its feed once per minute. Some other services refresh faster — every few seconds, or even on every tick.

That means at 10:31:30, you might see:

All three numbers are accurate as of when they were sampled. They differ because they were sampled at different moments and the market moved between samples. None is "right" or "wrong" — they're just three snapshots from three slightly different points on the same minute.

When the next Gold Silver Ledger refresh lands, the gap usually narrows or reverses. Over a longer view, all three sources track the same path. For more on the cadence, see How often spot prices update.

A particular subspecies of mismatch shows up when comparing against a precious-metals dealer site. Some dealers display a "spot" number that's actually their indicative bid (what they'd pay for a generic ounce of metal from a customer), and that indicative bid often includes a small margin off the true mid.

It's not deceptive — it's how their business works, and they're transparent about it once you look closely. But it means their "spot" can run a few dollars below a neutral mid quote at any moment, which can look like a discrepancy if you're treating it as if it were a market mid.

A dealer's premium on a coin or bar is a separate matter from this — premium is the dealer's markup above whatever spot reference they're using, and it covers fabrication, distribution, and margin. See Entering the premium you paid for the framing on the buy-side.

Around weekly market opens and closes, two services can diverge briefly because they're handling the closure differently.

These differences usually close out within the first few minutes after the new session is fully active. See How often spot prices update for the calendar of legitimate quiet windows.

To put a number on it: a difference of a few dollars on gold or a few cents on silver between Gold Silver Ledger and another reputable source is normal at any moment.

A difference of tens of dollars on gold, or more than a dollar on silver, that persists across multiple minutes and isn't explained by any of the causes above is unusual and worth a closer look.

The triage at that point:

That sequence resolves nearly every genuine discrepancy. The much more common outcome — once you walk through the bid-ask, currency, units, and source explanations above — is that the two numbers turn out to have been reasonable agreements all along, just expressed in slightly different ways.