FX rates and the P2P premium

Why the official rate matters

On its own it says little. It becomes meaningful next to the price at which the same currency actually changes hands — on P2P. The gap between the two is the dollar premium in that country, and it is what P2P arbitrage is about.

The premium is rarely accidental. A persistently high one means either currency controls that make buying dollars at the official rate impossible, or a shortage of physical foreign currency. One that jumps in a day usually means news — and it shows up in the P2P price before it reaches the newswires.

Where the rates come from

Straight from the central banks, with the source named for each currency: the National Bank of Ukraine, the Bank of Russia, the National Bank of Kazakhstan, the National Bank of Georgia, Narodowy Bank Polski, the Central Bank of Turkey, the Central Bank of Uzbekistan, the Central Bank of Armenia and the Central Bank of Azerbaijan.

Other currencies use the European Central Bank reference rates. That is not the same as a local regulator's rate, so the table names the source separately — you can see where a figure came from a national bank and where it was converted.

Why some charts are shorter

Not every central bank serves a date range. Ukraine, Russia and Poland do, so their history was loaded at once for a hundred and twenty days. Kazakhstan, Georgia, Uzbekistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan publish only today's rate, so their history accumulates one point per day and the chart grows as the service runs.

We will not draw in the missing points. On an exchange rate chart that would look particularly convincing and be particularly wrong: where there is no data, any line is invention.

Commercial bank rates

Here the limits are worth stating: few banks publish rates openly. Ours are Monobank and PrivatBank. For other countries free bank APIs barely exist, so the table shows a dash rather than an invented number.

What to check before trading

The ad’s limits. Every ad has a minimum and a maximum, and the best price is often available only over a narrow range. Our route finder drops pairs whose limits do not overlap — which is why its list is shorter than that of scanners which skip the check.

The payment method. A price is almost always tied to a particular bank. If you do not have it, the best figure on screen does not apply to you.

The merchant’s record. Completed orders say more than a few hundredths on price. The order book builder shows the whole queue along with those numbers.

Where the numbers on currency pages come from

From the exchanges’ own public data, refreshed every few minutes. The typical price is the median of the ads, not the best of them: a single ad at a round number says nothing about a market, while the median does.