Methodology
How we calculate prices
Where the hub’s prices, exchange rates and gold values come from, and how they are calculated.
Market prices are Crystal Ball Markets’ own indicative quotes from our trading platform. The chart on each page streams them live.
Exchange rates come from official fixed pegs where a currency has one (Gulf currencies, CFA francs), from the European Central Bank’s daily reference rates and, for currencies the European Central Bank does not publish, from market data providers such as ExchangeRate-API. Each page names its source and time.
Long-term history (gold price by year and exchange rate history) uses monthly averages of official reference rates from more than 100 central banks, and of the gold price, collected by Frankfurter. Monthly averages smooth out single-day highs and lows.
Gold value = spot price per troy ounce ÷ 31.1035 grams × weight of the unit × purity × exchange rate. Purity follows hallmark standards: 22K = 91.6%, 21K = 87.5%, 18K = 75%, 14K = 58.5%; Thai gold is 96.5%. Local units: tola and bhori 11.66 g, chỉ and don 3.75 g, lượng 37.5 g, Thai baht weight 15.244 g, Hong Kong tael 37.429 g, Iraqi mithqal 5 g.
Coin values are the value of the fine gold each coin contains. Dealers and jewellers add a premium.
These are international values, not retail prices: local prices include taxes, making charges and margins.
Technical analysis and summaries
Technical levels come from our own price history: pivot points from each market’s last complete trading day (17:00 to 17:00 New York), and moving averages and oscillators on hourly bars built from our 5-minute prices and on daily bars.
Each indicator is read by a fixed rule. A moving average (5 to 200 periods, simple and exponential) reads bullish when the price is above it and bearish when it is below. RSI (14) reads bullish from 50 to 70 and bearish from 30 to 50, overbought above 70 and oversold below 30. The stochastic (14, 3, 3) reads bullish when %K is above %D and bearish when it is below, overbought above 80 and oversold below 20. MACD (12, 26, 9) reads bullish above its signal line and bearish below it. Williams %R (14) reads bullish above −50 and bearish below it, overbought above −20 and oversold below −80. CCI (14) reads bullish above 0 and bearish below it, overbought above 200 and oversold below −200. ROC (12) reads bullish above 0 and bearish below it. Overbought and oversold count as neutral.
Moving averages and oscillators are scored separately: the share of bullish readings minus the share of bearish ones, from −1 to +1. The summary is the average of the two scores: above +0.5 is strongly bullish, above +0.1 bullish, below −0.1 bearish and below −0.5 strongly bearish; anything between is neutral. The summary describes what the indicators show at that moment. It is not a forecast, a trading signal or investment advice, and past readings say nothing about future prices.
Research Desk and daily notes
The Crystal Ball Markets Research Desk publishes the daily market notes. Each note is written with AI from figures our own systems compute: prices from our trading platform, exchange rates from the European Central Bank and the share of our clients buying each market. An automated editor then checks every sentence against those figures and rewrites anything unclear; a note with any number that is not in our data is never published. Notes report what happened, with no forecasts or trading advice. Nothing on the hub is investment advice.
CFDs are complex instruments and come with a high risk of losing money rapidly due to leverage. Capital is at risk.