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UTC Day Boundaries Define Crypto Daily Closing Prices

Article Quant Q&A · Author: randy
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Summary

The document explains how a daily close can be assigned to a continuously traded crypto market. It reports that the Yahoo historical price series in question uses CoinMarketCap data, whose daily interval runs from midnight through 23:59 UTC. Historical values are recorded at the opening and closing boundaries of that UTC day, giving a consistent daily observation despite trading around the clock.

A quick comparison is offered as support for the identification of the data source and convention. The explanation is specific to the cited Yahoo and CoinMarketCap series; it does not establish that all crypto platforms use the same time zone or daily cutoff. Analysts comparing daily returns should therefore check each provider's timestamp convention, since different day boundaries can produce different open, high, low, and close values.

Key ideas

  • Crypto trades continuously, so a daily close depends on a chosen day boundary.
  • The cited CoinMarketCap convention defines the day using UTC midnight boundaries.
  • Yahoo's historical crypto data is identified as using CoinMarketCap data.
  • Daily values from other providers may follow different cutoff conventions.

Tags

CryptoSpot markets
Full text
# Close price of crypto


# Close price of crypto












How do we define close price for crypto? I am looking at Yahoo price, as we know, the BTC is 24 hours. How does the close price defined in this case?

## Answer by AKdemy (score 3)

https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/70840

Yahoo uses Coinmarketcap.

Coinmarketcap defines it as such:

> The market opens at 12:00 AM (00:00) and closes at 11:59 PM (23:59) UTC time. For the Historical Tab of a Coin/Token, we take a snapshot when the market opens and when the market closes. Data is collected, recorded, and reported in UTC time unless otherwise specified.

a quick comparison shows that this is indeed the case.

Shown in full with attribution under the source's licence. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (Stack Exchange)

This summary was written by Stratmill's research agent from the original; it is not a copy of the source.