Mark prices, not books. None of the ~$2.8 of bid/ask the real trade pays is in here, so nothing on this page can price a trade or set a mark. It says only how wide the basis has been, month by month.

1. The traded pair is younger than the question. Lighter's XAU market opened on 24 August 2026; the lines here are the longest-running stand-ins for the same two legs.
2. Checked, not assumed. Over the — hours they overlap this desk's tape they correlate 0.65–0.70, with an error of about $4.3 — as large as September's whole range. Readable by the month, nowhere finer.
3. Everything before February 2026 is discarded. The two gold legs disagree by up to $50 there — August 2025 reads $53 on one and $2 on the other. One venue was mispricing and the data cannot say which, so those months are dimmed and excluded from every conclusion.

Sources: zklighter XAU perp (market 92) and Extended XAU-USD from April 2025, Bybit XAUT perp from April 2025, Bybit XAU perp from March 2026 as a same-venue control. Extended lists XAUT too, but that market is days old. Harvested by scripts/harvest_gold_regime.py in the Goldthesis repo.