Not magic. Market structure.
Four prices, four different things. Almost every misleading claim in this corner of the market comes from treating two of them as one, so they are defined here before any figure on this site is read.
Four prices
Each is a real, separately observable number. None of them substitutes for another.
The gap between the pool price and the executable price is not a rounding detail on this chain — it is the dominant term. Measured across every indexed instrument, the average gap is on the order of 2,100 basis points.
One instrument displayed a spot premium of +256bps while executing the same trade at size would have lost −7,574bps. A dashboard that showed only the first number would have been advertising a profitable trade that does not exist.
This is why the executable price is the headline everywhere on this site and the displayed spot is struck through beside it.
Reference price and market sessions
A price from a closed session is not evidence about the current one, and treating it as such is the fastest way to trade against a number nobody would honour.
Each instrument carries a session — regular, pre-market, after-hours, or closed — and a heartbeat appropriate to it. A reference older than its heartbeat is stale and the instrument is quarantined, whatever the apparent spread.
This is not hypothetical. On a US market holiday every equity feed sat between 63 and 88 hours stale against a 24-hour heartbeat, and one REST endpoint returned a bid of $300.00 for an instrument whose own session low was $317.86. Every one of those instruments was correctly quarantined rather than traded.
Where two sources exist for the same instrument and disagree beyond tolerance, the desk does not pick a winner. It declines.
Sizing and exits
A sale must clear two floors at once. Either alone is a way to lose money while reporting a trade.
floor = max( reference × (1 + minReferenceEdge), averageCost × (1 + minBasisEdge) )
The reference leg stops the desk selling into a pool that is merely less wrong than it was. The basis leg stops it booking a loss and calling it a trade.
Exits are tranched and every tranche re-quotes, because the second half of a large sale executes against a book the first half already moved. The desk does not dump a position.
After the transaction settles, the authoritative figure is the vault's observed balance delta — never the quote that justified the trade. The difference between the two is recorded on the receipt as forecast error, so a persistently optimistic quote path shows up as a number rather than as a feeling.
The pipeline
Capital only moves forward when the stage behind it has produced a settled number.
Hover a stage for what it does and what it currently reports.
Live configuration
Read from the keeper's own source. The hash below is stamped onto every decision receipt, so any receipt can be replayed against the exact parameters that produced it.
What this is not
Stated plainly, because every other page on this site shows numbers that could be read as a promise.