How this site's rates are measured

The rates on this site come from three public sources, each with its own timing and limits. This page explains how they are collected, what is dropped, and what the site refuses to print.

Why a bank rate, a bureau rate and a crypto rate differ

A bank rate is built from the deals that banks report to the Bank of Ghana, and it is published once each working day. A bureau rate is a retail price set by a dealer who must hold cash, pay rent and take a margin, so it is higher than the bank rate. A crypto P2P rate is set by individual traders on an exchange, and it moves with the demand on that platform.

These three prices answer different questions. The bank rate is a reference for large reported transactions; the bureau rate is what a person pays for cash over a counter; the crypto rate is what a peer-to-peer desk asks for a transfer. None of them is the 'real' rate, and none of them is wrong. They simply measure different things, and the gap between them is the cost of turning one kind of dollar into another.

How the Bank of Ghana rate is built

The Bank of Ghana reference rate is computed from spot dollar-cedi transactions that banks report each working day. Only deals above a size threshold are included, and the rate is published as a weighted median, with buying, selling and mid prices. The weighted median closing rate is also published.

This means the rate is not a simple average. Each reported deal is weighted by its size, so a large transaction moves the median more than a small one. The buying and selling prices bracket the mid, and a bank's own counter rate will differ because the bank adds its own costs and margin.

How stale bureau quotes are caught

The bureau median is taken from quotes reported through CediRates, a public rates aggregator. It is a handful of Accra quotes, not a survey of bureaux. The aggregator stamps every row with today's date even when a bureau last updated days ago.

This site reads each quote's own last-updated time. Any quote older than a week is dropped, and the number dropped is recorded. What remains is the median of the fresh quotes, and that median is shown beside the interbank rate. A bureau board that has not changed for days will not weigh on the figure, but it will still appear in the bureau-by-bureau list with its true age.

What this site refuses to print

This site does not print a forecast. It records the rates it has seen and shows them as they were published. No attempt is made to predict where the cedi will go next.

It also refuses to print a 'real' rate, because no such rate exists outside a specific transaction. And it refuses to print a bureau quote whose last update cannot be dated. A reading is refused, and the previous one stays on the page, if the interbank rate is outside a plausible band, if fewer than two bureau quotes are fresh, if the gap leaves a band of minus three to plus fifteen per cent, if the Bank of Ghana date is more than a few days old, or if the interbank rate differs from an independent exchange-rate source by more than two and a half per cent.