Price discovery
- Price discovery is the process by which orders and trades form a price.
- StockTicker24 splits cards into "price discovery" and "Reference value" by open interest in U.S. dollars.
- Below USD 10,000: Reference value. USD 50,000 or more: price discovery. In between: the previous class stays.
Price discovery: definition, StockTicker24 display rules and dated production-data examples.
Definition
Exchanges build price discovery into their trading rules. The Tokyo Stock Exchange uses a call auction (itayose) at the open and the close, which finds one price where orders match. Between them it uses continuous trading (zaraba). Both follow price priority and time priority.
Nasdaq describes its Closing Cross as a price-discovery facility that sets the official close at one price. The NYSE assigns each listed stock one Designated Market Maker, whose role includes supporting price discovery at the open, the close and during imbalances. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission discusses the quality of price discovery in its Concept Release on Equity Market Structure (Release No. 34-61358).
A value formed while the cash market is closed does not set the next cash-market opening price.
price discovery is about how a price is formed, not about which way it goes.
How it appears on StockTicker24
Each card has a display class based on open interest × mark price.
| Open interest in USD | Display class |
|---|---|
| Below 10,000 | Reference value: gray badge, solid line for every hour |
| 10,000 to below 50,000 | The class the card already had |
| 50,000 or more | Price discovery: solid line in cash hours, dashed line when the cash market is closed |
A reference-value card never shows a dashed line. This is a display classification based on open interest; it does not measure order-book depth. Foreign-exchange cards calculated from two contracts skip the test and use the price-discovery display from the start. For an index, the gray badge reads "Reference (index)".
The site retrieved its production board snapshot (/api/board-snapshot) at Oct 10, 2026, 05:01:18 UTC (capturedAt 05:01:10.627 UTC).
| Card | Open interest (contracts) | Mark price | Open interest × mark (USD) | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 47,706.09 | 7,820.4 | 373,080,706 | 50,000 or more |
| Nikkei 225 | 42.3197 | 68,900.0 | 2,915,827 | 50,000 or more |
| Chevron | 157.74 | 212.13 | 33,461 | Between thresholds |
The Chevron card keeps whichever class it had before this snapshot.
the badge identifies the open-interest class; the line style identifies cash-market hours for price-discovery cards.
Examples from the current board
Saved observation:
Tables scroll horizontally. Values use each contract’s quoted unit; no currency conversion.
This card records a price in a separate perpetual-futures market; it does not measure price discovery as a number.
Price: mid price (mark if missing) · perpetual futures / vs. 24h earlier / / Saved / stale
Data: our board (perpetual-futures reference values), observed
Questions
Does the value at a closed hour become the next opening price?
No. It is a value formed on a separate market. It does not set the cash market's next price.
Is the dashed line a sign of missing data?
No. It marks hours when the related cash market is closed.
What happens between USD 10,000 and USD 50,000?
The card keeps the class it already had. In the snapshot above, Chevron at USD 33,461 is in this band, so the snapshot alone does not show its class.
Related
Sources
The production API examples are a fixed historical snapshot. Building this page does not fetch new prices.
External source titles and URLs were checked on Oct 11, 2026. The historical content retrieval dates are listed below.
- Tokyo Stock Exchange, 内国株の売買制度「売買成立の方法」 (content retrieved Aug 23, 2026, as cited on the Japanese page).
- Nasdaq, Nasdaq Closing Cross (content retrieved Aug 23, 2026, as cited on the Japanese page).
- New York Stock Exchange, NYSE Equities (content retrieved Aug 23, 2026, as cited on the Japanese page).
- U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Concept Release on Equity Market Structure (Release No. 34-61358; content retrieved Aug 23, 2026, as cited on the Japanese page).
- StockTicker24 production API
/api/board-snapshot, retrieved Oct 10, 2026, 05:01:18 UTC.