كيف نسعّر بياناتنا المرجعية، ولماذا لا تدّعي أبداً أنها لحظية

Open any price table on our markets pages and look underneath it. There is a stamp: “Reference pricing · 60-min cache”, followed by a UTC timestamp. Most trading sites would treat a line like that as small print. We treat it as the product description. This article unpacks every word of it: what a reference price actually is, where each number on our pages comes from, why they refresh hourly instead of pretending to tick in real time, and which numbers we refuse to show at all.

What “reference” means when a central bank says it

The clearest definition of a reference price comes not from a broker but from the European Central Bank. Every working day at around 14:10 CET, central banks across Europe hold a concertation procedure; the euro foreign exchange reference rates that result are published once per day, usually at around 16:00 CET ¹.

The ECB is direct about what those numbers are for. They are published “for information purposes only”, and using them for transaction purposes is strongly discouraged ¹. In December 2015 the ECB went further: it announced that publication would move from around 14:30 to around 16:00 CET, effective 1 July 2016. The rate itself is still set from a 14:15 snapshot; the release is deliberately delayed so the number is stale before anyone can deal on it. The stated aim: reinforce the line between informational reference rates and transactable benchmarks, in line with Financial Stability Board recommendations and IOSCO principles ².

ECB reference-rate publication

≈16:00 CET, working days^†

Central-bank concertation call

≈14:10 CET^†

€STR publication

Every TARGET2 business day^†

The point of this short history lesson: “reference, not execution” is not a hedge invented by broker marketing departments. It is the standard taxonomy of financial data. The most authoritative currency numbers in Europe are published once a day and explicitly labelled not-for-dealing. When our pages say “Reference pricing”, they are placing themselves in that category on purpose: numbers for orientation, comparison and cost arithmetic — not numbers a trade will fill at.

Where each number on our pages comes from

Behind the stamp sit three lanes of data, each with its own honesty contract.

First, official benchmark prints. The central-bank rates that appear in financing and carry context across the markets pages (the euro short-term rate, SOFR, SONIA and their peers) are read from their official publishers by an hourly job and stored in our own database. The ECB, for example, publishes €STR on every TARGET2 business day, based on the previous day’s transactions ³. On the page, each print carries either a live chip or a dated “curated” stamp; if a source goes quiet, the last good print stays visible with its date showing. The page never invents a fresher number.

Second, ECB-derived conversion rates. Where the site needs to translate one currency into another (calculator arithmetic, not quoting), it uses the ECB’s daily reference rates, served through Frankfurter, an open-source exchange-rate API that republishes official central-bank reference series, the ECB’s among them ⁴. We cache those rates for 24 hours for a simple reason: the source publishes once per working day ¹. Refreshing faster than the publisher would add nothing but the illusion of freshness. And this lane is never used for the price displays themselves.

Third, the reference engine. The indicative pair quotes, sparklines and spread examples across the markets pages come from a deterministic in-house model: each instrument is anchored to a documented base price, and a small variation is re-seeded once per hour. This is the lane the “60-min cache” stamp belongs to. These quotes exist so you can compare costs and see how prices behave (realistic magnitudes, honestly stated spreads), and every table that shows them repeats the caveat in plain words: indicative pricing, actual fills may differ.

Why we refuse to fake real time

A price that flickers several times a second is making a promise about latency: that a live execution feed sits directly behind the pixels. On many trading websites the numbers dance while the pipe behind them refreshes far more slowly: the motion is theatre, borrowed from the aesthetics of a dealing desk to make a brochure feel like a terminal. We think a reader is better served by a slower number that tells the truth about its age than by a fast-looking one that lies about it. So the stamp states the cache window, and the timestamp states the hour the numbers were generated.

A flickering price is a promise about latency. We would rather label the cache than fake the tick.

This also hands you a portable test for any trading site, ours included: pick a number, then look for its cadence and its timestamp. If a page will not tell you how old a price is, treat the motion as decoration. And remember that a displayed quote (anyone’s) can only ever approximate your real entry cost; what a fill actually costs is a subject of its own, worked through in the full cost of a CFD trade.

The numbers we refuse to show

Some absences on our pages are deliberate. Equity index levels are licensed intellectual property: the major index families are owned and licensed by their index houses, and our own research found no legally clean, free source for republishing them commercially. Where a clean feed is not in place, the page shows an explicit “Data not populated” state instead of a number. A gap, plainly labelled, is the honest state; an invented level would be the dishonest one.

Crypto prices got the same treatment. In August 2026 we investigated four free price sources (the public market-data endpoints of three major trading venues and one aggregator) as candidates for the crypto pages. All four worked technically. All four failed on their terms of use, which variously confine free access to personal or internal non-commercial use, or bar redistribution and derived works outright: a broker’s public page is commercial redistribution, and a figure computed from the data is a derived work. So there is no free crypto price lane on this site — not scraped, not quietly embedded — until terms actually permit one.

The end-state: our own dealt prices

The reference stamps are not a permanent design choice. The end-state, documented in our engineering plans from the start, is for the markets pages to run on the broker’s own execution feed, the prices clients actually deal on. A broker publishing its own tradable quotes has no licensing or redistribution problem, because the data is its own. When a surface switches from the reference engine to that feed, its label will change with it, and not before. Roadmap honesty cuts both ways: we will not call a number live until it is, and we will not keep calling one “reference” once it has stopped being that.

The stamp under the table is a contract in miniature: this number is for orientation, it was generated at this hour, and its source is what we say it is. It is the same posture behind why our education is free and ungated: a broker’s public site is a place to earn trust, and trust survives contact with detail. Read the stamps: here, and everywhere else you research.