CFDs are complex instruments and carry a significant risk of losing money. Leverage cap, retail loss percentage, and crypto availability are entity-specific — see risk disclosure for your jurisdiction.
Markets method
How we price every market.
Reference quotes are not magic. This page walks through where the prices on every Markets surface come from, how spreads are measured, and how rollovers and gaps are priced — chapter by chapter.
Where prices begin
Liquidity
Every reference quote you see on these pages starts as a depth-weighted blend of the deepest available venues for that instrument. We pull top-of-book snapshots from each contributing venue, weight them by available size at the prevailing best bid and offer, and discard any single venue that drifts more than a configured threshold from the rest of the cohort. The blended median is what gets stamped to the page — never a passthrough of a single thin book.
- Venue coverage is asset-class specific. Forex blends Tier-1 bank books; indices blend exchange cash and futures; commodities source from the primary listing venue plus regional mirrors.
- Outlier venues are excluded automatically: any quote more than 2.5 median absolute deviations from the cohort median is dropped from the blend for that snapshot.
- The blend always cites its underlying — there is no synthetic instrument on these pages. If a venue halts, the affected instrument flags as halted rather than carrying a stale last quote.
Refresh cadence · 60-min cache window
Min, typical, measurement window
Spreads
A spread claim is only as honest as the window it was measured over. Every "from X pips" or "from X points" line on the markets pages is paired with a measurement window: a date range and the venue or blend the measurement came from. The minimum is the tightest observed quote during that window; the typical is the median across all snapshots in the same window. We never publish a minimum without the median beside it.
- Measurement windows are weekly. Last week's window closes Sunday 22:00 UTC; the new window opens Monday 22:00 UTC. The change is timestamped, not silently rolled.
- Wide-spread events stay visible. A spike during news doesn't get averaged out of the typical — the median is robust by design, but the maximum during the window is also retained and surfaced on instrument detail.
- Execution spreads can differ. The page-level spread is the reference observation; the spread on a working order can vary with venue selection, order size, and time of day.
Window cadence · weekly · published Mondays 22:00 UTC
Carrying positions overnight
Rollovers
Overnight financing on a CFD position reflects the published interest-rate differential between the two legs of the instrument, plus a transparent margin disclosed per asset class. For forex pairs the legs are the two underlying currency rates; for indices and shares the legs are the financing benchmark for the listing currency. We do not bury the broker margin inside the rate — it is published as a separate line.
- Triple-swap day is disclosed in advance. The convention is Wednesday for most instruments to pre-load the weekend; the timing flips to Friday for instruments where the underlying trades into the weekend.
- Weekend financing pre-applies on the cut-off. A position held over the cut-off is charged or credited as if it were held over the full weekend, regardless of when it was opened.
- Triple-swap day timing is locale-aware on this page. The exact UTC cut-off for each instrument lives on the per-class table; the convention summary lives in your account dashboard.
Snapshot cadence · daily · 22:00 UTC
Open-to-open events
Gap pricing
A gap is any move where there is no continuous price between the close and the next open — weekend opens, halts, earnings releases at scheduled times, futures rolls. Orders resting through a gap fill at the prevailing book at re-open, not at the last observed pre-gap quote. Stops are honoured at the venue's best available price after the gap; the actual fill and the displayed stop level are disclosed side-by-side in your account history.
- Gap-fill slippage is published per instrument as a 30-day median, so you can size stops with a realistic expectation rather than against the displayed level alone.
- Halts are flagged in the table the moment the venue halts. The row dims to the halted state and the badge stays until the venue resumes; CFD pricing tracks the underlying.
- Earnings windows are inline on the shares table. A flag on the row warns when a release is within the next 24 hours, so positions through the release are deliberate, not accidental.
Slippage history · 30-day median · refreshed daily
Crypto cross-venue blends
Exchange aggregation
Crypto markets trade 24/7 across distributed venues with materially different depths. The reference quote on our crypto pages aggregates the top centralised venues by 30-day median depth, weights each by current top-of-book size, and publishes the depth-weighted median. A single venue trading off-market against the cohort is dropped from the snapshot until it re-converges; off-cohort venues are logged and disclosed on the per-instrument page.
- Cohort membership is reviewed monthly. New venues join only after sustained depth-at-top exceeds the cohort's 10th percentile for a full review window.
- Stablecoin pairs are handled separately. The reference quote tracks the underlying instrument, not the stablecoin's redemption proxy; depeg events surface as a flag rather than as price movement.
- Funding rates are pulled from the perpetual venue with the deepest book for the instrument, with the source venue named on the per-instrument page.
Venue cohort review · monthly · published in audit log
Verification and retention
Audit methodology
Every reference quote published on these pages is retained for a minimum of 12 months in an append-only log: the inputs (venue snapshots), the blend weights, and the published output. Any change to the methodology is versioned with an effective-from timestamp; prior methodology versions remain reachable from this page. Independent regulatory audits use this log as the primary source of truth.
- Methodology versioning is semver-style. Patch versions document non-impacting wording changes; minor versions adjust weights or windows; major versions change the blend or the venue cohort.
- Retention exceeds the regulatory minimum in every jurisdiction we operate in. Earlier snapshots can be requested through compliance for the full 12-month window.
- Any model bug or correction is disclosed in the audit log with both the affected window and the corrected published quote. Corrections do not silently rewrite the historical feed.
Audit log retention · 12-month minimum · append-only
Next
Read the rooms it powers.
Every spread, sparkline, and financing line on a markets page is sourced from the method above. Start with the asset class you trade most.