Insight · market basics
How the Ukrainian day-ahead market works: an hourly market, not one price for tomorrow.
DAM matters as 24 hourly decisions: where to buy, where to sell, how much risk to carry and what changed before intraday.
Insights
In brief
A day-ahead auction for 24 delivery hours; each hour has its own price.
The intraday market adjusts positions closer to delivery as forecasts and facts change.
Price caps, cross-border flows and scarcity regime explain why the same average price can carry different risk.
Combines official prices, forecast bands and audit trail; the final decision stays with a human.
DAM is 24 hourly auctions
Ukraine's day-ahead market, or DAM, clears electricity for the next day hour by hour; DAM bids are accepted until 12:00 on the day before delivery. A trader does not stop at a BASE index; the shape matters: night hours, morning ramp, evening peak, cap-like clusters and thin liquidity windows.
The Market Operator, OREE, publishes hourly DAM/IDM prices. For Alvo, that is the upstream truth for the market read; when freshness is stale or unavailable, the interface should say so instead of dressing an empty signal as live.
IDM is correction, not a duplicate
After day-ahead clearing, new facts arrive: weather, demand, repairs, imports and exports, grid constraints. The intraday market lets a desk adjust a position, but it does not erase the original day-ahead risk.
A serious trading read looks at DAM and IDM together: whether the intraday spread confirms the plan, whether the market rewrote expectations and whether the new signal is strong enough for manual review.
Regime matters: caps, scarcity, border
Ukraine's price caps and rule versions are not decorative compliance text. They shape the observable target: if an hour sits in a cap-like cluster, the forecast band and trade plan should explain that as a regime condition, not ordinary demand and supply.
Cross-border context adds another layer. Flow direction shows what physically moved, while capacity and coupling rules explain why a spread between Ukraine and a neighboring benchmark can exist without executable arbitrage.
How Alvo reads the morning
The operating read starts with the official price layer and freshness, then moves to the p10/p50/p90 band, basis, risk guardrails and decision brief. It is not a replacement for the trader; it makes the decision repeatable and audit-friendly.
FAQ
Is the DAM price the same for the whole day?
No. DAM clears hourly: 24 delivery hours have separate prices and different risk.
Does IDM cancel a day-ahead mistake?
No. IDM can correct a position, but execution, liquidity and imbalance risk remain separate guardrails.
Does Alvo trade automatically?
No. V1 is decision support: data, forecast, plan, explanation and audit trail without automatic order submission.
Sources and next steps
Workspace
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Open Alvo: official prices, forecast band, basis and decision brief are shown together.
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