Every feed stops sometimes. A venue has an outage, a chain node falls behind, a publisher changes something. That is normal. What matters is what a markets Super Intelligence says in the minutes when one of its sources has gone quiet.
The answer that looks normal
Picture a trending feed that has stopped. If the tool behind it returns an empty list, the list looks like a fact. Nothing is trending. A system reading that list will report a quiet chain, in a confident voice, and it will be wrong.
The same trap exists with numbers. A feed that stops can leave its last value in place. The value still looks like a price. Nothing on its face says it has stopped moving for a reason other than a calm market.
What the tools return
NoVo’s MCP & API handles this at the source. A stopped feed answers with an error and a retry time. It never answers with an empty result. The SI reading the tool cannot mistake an outage for a quiet market, because the two arrive in different forms. The design is described in machine-readable error codes.
Readings that do arrive carry age_seconds. A value that has stopped updating shows a growing age. That is the second line of defense. The first catches a feed that is down. The second catches one that is behind.
What the SI does with it
It says the feed is down. It says which one. If there is a retry time, it can pass that on. Then it stops. Dr. NoVo does not fill the silence with a remembered value or an estimate from a neighboring market.
That last part is the discipline. A language system can always produce a plausible stand-in, and the stand-in is where invented market data comes from. An SI earns trust in the moments when it has less to say.
Old versus missing versus resting
Three states get confused. A missing reading has no value at all. An old reading has a value and an age that is too large. A resting reading is old on purpose. Stock token supply over a weekend is one of those, because minting follows market hours.
A markets SI should say which state it is in. “The feed is down”, “this is from an hour ago” and “this has not changed since Friday, as expected” are three different sentences. More on the middle case is in delayed versus stale, and on stating ages in why a markets SI says how old every number is.
What a trader does
Take the outage as information. If the SI cannot read a venue, you are trading that venue without the read. That may be fine. It should be a choice. Check again after the retry time. And be wary of any system that has never once told you a feed was down.