How to read the price comparison

A row is a market area plus a product. The same area appears as many times as you add products to it, and a product appears as many times as you add areas. That is why comparing one zone's day-ahead against its own half-hourly day-ahead means adding it twice.

Auction rows lead with the exchange's own published clearing price. Where that does not cover an interval, regulatory and secondary feeds fill the gap, and the source line under the chart names which parts came from where and how many intervals each contributed.

Cash-out price is pickable alongside auction products, or on its own. It is read live at request time rather than from the archive, and where it comes from differs by zone: GB from its settlement system price, one German control area from the national regulator's balancing-energy price because no imbalance document is published for it on the pan-European feed, and every other zone from that feed's imbalance document.

A dashed imbalance line is the long side of a zone that prices the two sides of an imbalance differently. Imbalance is always drawn as published and is never converted between currencies, whatever the currency control is set to.

GB is the only market here that does not price in euro. Its half-hourly day-ahead auction is published in GBP only, and GB continuous trading prints in pounds per MWh. Everything else clears in euro, so a basket holding GB and anything else is a basket holding two currencies.

Converting is optional and never silent. The published figures are the default; a converted chart says which rate it used, where the rate came from and what date it is for. The reference option is that delivery day's published euro reference rate, so the same day converts the same way every time you open it - which a live rate would not. Nothing is ever converted at a guessed rate: where no rate is available the sterling series are drawn as published and the page says so.

The other controls are a row list. A market marked no source for a product has nothing collecting for that pair, and selecting it says which kind of absence it is rather than drawing an empty line. The trading-range toggle appears only when the basket holds a continuous row, since nothing else has ticks to draw.

The axis is read on the first row's market clock - the basket's first row, not the first price row, since an imbalance-only basket has none of the latter.

A delivery day is not the same 24 hours everywhere. GB's starts and ends an hour before a central European one, so a basket holding both draws a wider axis than either day. The page says so when that happens, naming the first row's clock, its hour count, and the wider span actually drawn. It says it only when it is true: a caption that confidently read “24 hours” over an axis holding 100 quarter-hours is the reason that note is conditional.

The volume chart never mixes quantities into one line, and the line style is the signal.

Solid

A published figure: an exchange's traded volume for its own market area, or, for GB, the published buy side of the auction.

Dashed

Either the volume derived from the published aggregated curves - the whole coupled area's supply/demand crossing, so it sits above any single exchange's traded volume and cannot represent block orders - or, on a GB auction, the published sell side.

GB's two sides are published separately, which no curve crossing can express: they coincide on the auctions that clear an internal book and diverge on the Norway-facing one, where the two zones sit across an interconnector.

Anything printed above or beside the charts is about this selection, not about the product. A row that drew nothing says why. A selection that hit the page's row budget says the charts are cut short of the full day. Two currencies on one axis says the levels are not comparable by eye. A missing reference rate says the sterling series are drawn as published and nothing was converted at a guessed rate.

The ledger below the price chart carries every price behind the chart, interval by interval and row by row, and it is the chart's text alternative rather than a repeat of it.

Available only for continuous rows. One line of ticks per continuous row: the wick is the interval's published low-high, and the box compares its last trade against its own volume-weighted average - red above, blue below. No opening trade is published, so there is no honest open to draw a real candle from, and the page does not draw one.