Your money moves without you

The rate

There is no single correct number for the dollar

The National Bank calculates the official one. Exchange booths quote another, the interbank market a third, and every bank keeps its own, split between buying and selling. Insights puts them side by side and does not pick one for you.

• The National Bank

  The official rate. One value a day, with no split between buying and selling.

• The unofficial rate

  The one people actually ask about. Buying and selling kept apart.

• Cash

  The averaged rate across exchange booths. Two sides again: what they give you and what they ask.

• Interbank

  What the banks settle at between themselves. The least like anything you will see at a counter.

Then there are 54 banks: most keep a rate both at the counter and on a card, buying and selling separately, while some carry only one of those. Together with the four benchmarks above that comes to 190 values for USD/UAH alone. The official rate comes from the NBU, the rest from Minfin, and we refresh them every hour from 08:00 to 21:00.

What else is in there

• Currencies — the dollar, the euro, the pound, the zloty, the franc, and about forty more that update daily. The history also holds ones that no longer exist: the Deutsche mark, the French franc, the Italian lira.

• Metals and commodities — gold, silver, platinum, Brent and WTI crude, gas, wheat, coffee. Twenty-six of them.

• Indices — 29, from the S&P 500 and Nasdaq to the FTSE, the DAX and the Nikkei. Plus 118 ETFs and 60 cryptocurrencies.

• Stocks — search runs across all of Yahoo Finance, not across a short list we drew up ourselves. On an individual stock, index or metal page the price updates live for as long as the page is open.

• The official rate goes back to 1996. Anything before September that year is still in karbovanets, so an all-time chart has a cliff at that point. That is the redenomination, and we do not smooth it over.

What it is for

A chart on its own explains nothing

So there are three different ways to read one.

1. 1Compare

   Several assets on the same axes

   The dollar, gold and the S&P 500 on one chart. On top you can switch on Ukrainian event markers: there are 18 in the database, among them the move to a floating hryvnia in February 2014. You can see where a kink in the line has an explanation.

2. 2Measure

   Return over a period

   A month, six months, a year, three, five. Next to it: the best and the worst year, the all-time high, and how far below its peak the asset sits today.

3. 3Try on

   What if I had bought back then

   Type in an amount and a date, and see what it would have become — after tax, at 18% income tax plus the 5% military levy. None of your real money goes into this: it works from the number you typed.

Limits

What these charts will not do for you

A few things worth knowing before you lean on them.

• There is no advice here on what to buy

  Insights shows numbers and leaves the decision to you. The analyst ratings on a stock page come from Yahoo Finance — we pass them through as they are and add no opinion of our own.

• Insights knows nothing about your budget

  Your accounts and your spending live in a different part of the app and never cross over. Even the calculator works from a figure you enter by hand.

• Hryvnia rates refresh hourly

  We collect them between 08:00 and 21:00 Kyiv time. Enough to convert a price; not enough to trade on.

• For now Insights lives on a big screen

  Comparing assets, and the pages for individual companies, open in the web version on a computer. In the phone app there is no «Insights» entry in the menu yet.