MarketLabOpen Australian market data · Hosted in Brisbane

About & methodology

MarketLab is Australia's open-data market lab: official rates, economy, energy and market-structure data, sourced, explained and hosted in Brisbane.

What MarketLab is

A free, factual reference site that brings together openly licensed data from Australian public institutions (the Reserve Bank of Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Securities & Investments Commission and the Australian Energy Market Operator) and presents it with clear charts, tables and plain-English explanations.

What MarketLab does not do

  • No buy, sell or hold signals, ratings, "top picks", rankings intended as recommendations, forecasts or price targets.
  • No ASX share prices, and no S&P/ASX index values. Those require paid licences that MarketLab does not hold. Links to ASX company pages are provided for convenience only, and ASX company announcements are not republished.
  • No personal advice. MarketLab doesn't know your circumstances and doesn't try to.
  • No accounts, advertising, affiliate links or tracking cookies.

How the data is collected

Small Python scripts run on a schedule on a server in Brisbane. Each script downloads the publisher's own file or API response, checks it, and stores each observation in a database alongside the source name, source URL, licence and retrieval time. After each run the site's data files are regenerated. The pages themselves are static, so what you see is exactly what was last exported.

  • RBA: statistical tables A2 (cash rate decisions), F1 (daily cash rate), F2 (government bond yields), F5 (indicator lending rates) and F11.1 (daily exchange rates). MarketLab reads the "Source" row of each table and only uses columns sourced by the RBA itself. For example, the AUD/USD column (sourced from WM/Reuters) and money-market columns sourced from ASX or FENICS are excluded.
  • ABS: the ABS Data API (SDMX). Full histories are reloaded each run so revisions flow through automatically.
  • ASIC: the daily aggregated short position report files. MarketLab keeps roughly the most recent six months of reports and adds each new report as it's published.
  • AEMO: the monthly aggregated price and demand files (5-minute intervals, by NEM region). MarketLab calculates daily figures from them.

Checks

  • Every series has a plausible range. A value outside it stops that series from updating until it has been looked at, rather than publishing a likely error.
  • Series are only published if they have a source and licence record.
  • Each chart shows when MarketLab last checked the source and, where the publisher provides one, the source's own publication date.

Calculations (derived figures)

  • Energy daily average price: the simple (unweighted) mean of the day's 5-minute regional reference prices. AEMO timestamps mark the end of each interval, so the interval ending 00:00 belongs to the previous day. A day is only included if at least 280 of its 288 intervals are present. Daily maximum and average demand are calculated the same way.
  • Short interest changes: the arithmetic difference, in percentage points, between a product's reported short percentage in the latest report and in the report 5 or 20 reports earlier.
  • "vs a year earlier": compared with the latest observation dated at least 365 days before the current one.
  • The cash rate chart is drawn as steps between RBA decisions, extended to the latest daily observation.

Update schedule (AEST)

  • AEMO electricity prices: daily, 6:20am.
  • ASIC short positions: weekdays, 10:20am and 4:20pm (ASIC publishes reports a few business days after the position date).
  • ABS indicators: weekdays, 11:50am (after the ABS's 11:30am Canberra-time release slot).
  • RBA tables: weekdays, 5:40pm (after the RBA's afternoon updates).
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Who runs MarketLab

MarketLab is an independent project by Brandan McMurtrie, based in Brisbane. Interests: Brandan is also a licensed Queensland real estate agent with Derby Property Group. MarketLab's data pages contain no property listings, promotion or paid placement. MarketLab isn't affiliated with, or endorsed by, the RBA, ABS, ASIC, AEMO or ASX.

Questions or errors: see Corrections.