How to Route Real-Time Gold and Silver Prices from a Unified WebSocket Stream

When I first connected to a precious metals WebSocket API, I expected to get a clean stream of prices. What I actually got was a firehose of mixed ticks—gold, silver, platinum—all arriving through the same callback. If you’ve ever tried to build a trading bot or a custom chart, you know this is a recipe for disaster. In this post, I’ll share how I solved the problem with a few lines of Python and a clear mapping strategy. The scenario: You have one WebSocket URL that pushes quotes for multiple metals. You need to separate them so you can update different UI components, run independent strategies, or store them in distinct database tables. The data pain point: every message uses the same JSON structure, and the only differentiator is a field like symbol . If you don’t act on it immediately, everything gets mixed up. Identify Assets via the Symbol Field Start by checking the API docs for the field that carries the instrument code. Usually it’s symbol , but instrumentId or type are also used. Here’s a typical reference table: Field Description Example symbol Asset code XAUUSD, XAGUSD instrumentId Internal platform ID 1001, 1002 type Asset class gold, silver I turn this into a dictionary mapping each symbol to a human-readable category: asset_map = { " XAUUSD " : " gold " , " XAGUSD " : " silver " , " XPTUSD " : " platinum " } Buffer Messages by Type Because these streams are high-frequency, I avoid processing every tick individually. Instead, the WebSocket callback just updates an in-memory store that is already grouped by asset type: # Keep the hot path extremely light def on_message ( msg ): symbol = msg [ ' symbol ' ] price = msg [ ' price ' ] asset_type = asset_map . get ( symbol , " unknown " ) cache [ asset_type ][ symbol ] = price Then, a background timer fetches the latest prices from cache["gold"] and cache["silver"] separately and does the actual work—like computing indicators or rendering charts. The key benefit is complete isolation: your gold logic never t