Official FX is not a market price

Every US dollar figure here is local currency converted at the official exchange rate — each central bank's own published rate, carrying that bank's own rate type: PTAX closing for Brazil, FIX for Mexico, the representative market rate for Colombia, the reference rate for Argentina. There is no token price table in this database, so none of these figures is a market valuation.

That was not true before 1 September 2026. Until then these figures were built from a market series of unrecoverable provenance, which sat more than 5% from the official rate on 82.9% of Argentine days, 12.6% of Brazilian, 9.4% of Colombian and 3.0% of Mexican ones. Moving to the central banks' own rates, for the whole history rather than only for recent dates, restated Argentine settled value by +76.4%, Brazilian by +0.7%, Colombian by −0.5% and Mexican by +3.1%. A figure taken from this site before that date will not match the same figure today, and the reason is the exchange rate, not the chain data.

The older series was kept published for two days after that change, so the difference stayed checkable. It was withdrawn on 3 September 2026 and is no longer published in any form. The restatement it documented is recorded here, in the figures above, and in the analysis rules; the series itself is not something this site serves any more.

The rate ignores de-pegs. It also ignores parallel markets, and Argentina is where that matters most: the official rate and the rates people actually transact at can differ widely, so Argentine dollar figures understate real-world value by that gap. Choosing the central bank's rate makes that understatement explicit rather than accidental.

Rate coverage now begins decades before transfer coverage — the Brazilian series runs from 1984 — so no figure on this site is missing a rate. Days with no rate would be gaps in the series. They are never filled with a zero and never interpolated. A rate held forward across a weekend is a rate; a rate held forward for more than a week means the series stopped, and those days are treated as absent.

Where a figure sums several currencies, it is published only when every contributor has a rate that day. A partial sum presented as a total is the failure this rule exists to prevent. As of the change above that rule currently removes nothing, because every contributor has a rate; it is kept for the day one does not.