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. 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.
Most important: Alvo V1 does not submit market orders. The system structures data, risk and explanation, but the responsible market participant makes the final decision and carries it into their trading venue.
Insight · market basics
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
Want to inspect it in the workspace?
Open Alvo: official prices, forecast band, basis and decision brief are shown together.
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