Spot price

The price of dealing now. Immediate is a convention rather than an instant: in foreign exchange the standard value date for most pairs is two business days after dealing, and metals conventionally settle on the same basis. A forward price, by contrast, is agreed today for a stated date further out, and the difference between the two is not a forecast but the cost of holding the asset until that date.

That difference is the cost of carry, made up of financing and, for a physical commodity, storage and insurance, less any income the holding produces. Because carry shrinks as the delivery date approaches, a futures price and the spot price converge towards expiry. A rolling retail contract has no delivery date to carry the cost, so the same cost arrives a night at a time as a financing adjustment instead, which is the same economics collected by a different route.

The trip is expecting one spot price to exist. In a market dealt over the counter there is no single venue and no official print, so any published spot figure is a composite drawn from contributors at a moment in time, and two providers can differ. Out of hours the problem sharpens: where the underlying market is closed, a quoted spot level is commonly derived from the listed future adjusted back for carry, which means it can move while nothing in the spot market has traded at all.