My currency conversion looks off

If you're viewing Gold Silver Ledger in a currency other than USD and the converted figures look a little different from what your bank, a rate-quote site, or your own mental math is producing, the explanation is almost always one of a small handful of things.

Two reputable sources looking at the same FX market at the same moment will rarely disagree by much — but they will rarely agree to the cent, either.

This article walks through the common causes and how to spot which one is at work.

Gold Silver Ledger stores every value in USD and converts to your chosen display currency at the moment of display, using the most recent rate from its FX feed. Two things follow from that, and they account for most "the conversion looks off" reports:

Once you have those two facts in mind, the rest of this article is mostly applying them.

Before assuming the conversion is off, confirm the conversion is happening at all.

The most common embarrassing moment in this whole space is realizing you'd been comparing your Dashboard total (in EUR) against your dealer receipts (in USD) and concluding the app was wrong.

To rule that out, switch the display currency to USD briefly and confirm the underlying number is what you expect. Then switch back. See Choosing your display currency for the mechanics.

This is the single biggest reason "the conversion looks off" reports happen.

The FX rate Gold Silver Ledger uses to convert your portfolio values is a mid-market rate — the neutral midpoint between the global bid and ask for a currency pair, with no markup added.

It's what currency traders quote to each other, and it's also what rate-quote sites and finance apps like XE, Google Finance, and most charting tools display.

The FX rate your bank or card actually charges you is something different. Banks and card networks add a spread — typically 1% to 3% — to the mid rate, plus sometimes a fixed fee. So the rate you experience when you move actual money is consistently worse than the mid rate.

A worked example, just to make the gap concrete. Suppose the mid rate is 1.00 USD = 0.92 EUR.

None of those three numbers is wrong. They're a mid rate (what the market actually clears at between major players), a retail bank rate (what a customer is offered), and a card rate (somewhere in between).

The mid rate is the right one to use for portfolio valuation, because it's the closest thing to "the price right now without anyone's margin on it."

If you're comparing the Dashboard against your bank's quoted rate and finding a 1%–3% gap, that gap is the bank's spread, not a Gold Silver Ledger error. If you're comparing against another mid-rate source (XE, Google, your trading app), the agreement will usually be much tighter.

FX rates in Gold Silver Ledger refresh once every five minutes during FX market hours. Other services may refresh faster — every minute, every few seconds, or on every tick.

The practical implication is that during a fast-moving FX market (around a major central-bank announcement, for instance), a sub-second source can briefly look "ahead" of the Dashboard by a few basis points. The gap closes when the next Gold Silver Ledger refresh lands, usually within a couple of minutes.

For day-to-day calm, the cadence is invisible. FX rates don't typically move enough in five minutes for the difference to be noticeable in a portfolio total. But if you happen to be checking during a sharp move, you may briefly see a gap that resolves itself on the next refresh.

The full detail on the cadence and why it sits at five minutes is in How often FX rates update.

A subtler cause of "looks off" — particularly for users who've recently switched display currency or come back to the app after a while.

Every non-USD value in Gold Silver Ledger is being computed live: stored USD × current FX rate. That includes:

So if EUR strengthens against USD between two visits, your EUR-converted portfolio total drops on the second visit even though no metal-spot price has moved and no transaction has been added. The metal didn't lose value; the currency you're measuring it in gained value.

This can feel surprising the first time you notice it. The longer explainer is in Why your historical values shift slightly when you change currency, which covers the storage-vs-display model in detail. The short read: USD-side history is fixed; EUR-side (or any other currency) is recomputed live.

If your "expected" value was anchored to an FX rate from a previous visit, that's where the perceived gap is coming from.

A small but real source of confusion: USD/EUR and EUR/USD are different numbers, and the difference matters.

Both of those describe the same FX market at the same moment. They're reciprocals of each other (1 / 0.92 ≈ 1.087, give or take a rounding cent). But if you're glancing at a finance site that shows EUR/USD = 1.087 and mentally comparing against a Dashboard converting at USD/EUR ≈ 0.92, the numbers can look unrelated until you realise they're the same thing inverted.

Most consumer-facing tools quote the more common direction for each pair (EUR/USD, GBP/USD, USD/JPY, etc.), and most show both directions if you click into the pair. If the conversion looks off by an order of magnitude rather than a few percent, an inverted-rate mix-up is almost always the cause.

To put rough numbers on it: agreement to within roughly half a percent between Gold Silver Ledger's mid rate and another mid-rate source (XE, Google Finance, etc.) is normal at any moment.

A persistent gap of one percent or more, against another mid source (not against your bank's retail rate), is unusual.

The triage at that point:

A real FX feed bug is rare, but they do happen occasionally, and we'd rather hear about one early than late.