Equibles is built for decisions, so every number has to be traceable and mean exactly what it says. Here's how the data is sourced and handled.
Sources
Regulatory and fundamental data comes straight from the source of record, not a downstream aggregator. Prices, quotes and option data come from a market-data feed (see Prices below), and the analyst-consensus fallback is a compiled consensus, labelled as such wherever it appears:
- SEC EDGAR: filings (10-K/10-Q/8-K/20-F/6-K/40-F and amendments, DEF 14A and other proxy materials, S-1/S-3/S-3ASR/S-4/F-1/F-3/F-3ASR/F-4 registration statements and amendments, SC TO/SC 14D9 tender offers, NT late-filing notices, ARS annual reports to holders), XBRL company facts, 13F holdings, Forms 3/4/5 insider activity, Form 144 proposed sales, Form D, NPORT-P / N-CEN funds, Form ADV advisers.
- FINRA: short volume, short interest, and off-exchange (dark-pool) volume.
- FRED, CFTC, CBOE: economic series, futures positioning, and VIX / put-call ratios.
- Congressional disclosures: member trades and net-worth bands.
- USAspending: federal contract awards.
- FDA: the advisory-committee meeting calendar.
- European market regulators: director (PDMR) transactions, net short-position registers, issuer annual and interim financial reports including ESEF filings, and fund holdings, where the regulator publishes them.
- Company webcasts and investor-relations sites: earnings-call audio (transcribed and speaker-attributed), official transcripts the company publishes, and events, slides and news.
- Analyst consensus: the consensus a company publishes on its own investor-relations site; when it publishes none, a compiled consensus, labelled as aggregated on every surface.
ETF identity comes from an active exchange-traded security-type directory and exact listed symbols, never a ticker or name pattern. An ETF page joins that listing to the exact SEC fund-series ticker when one is stored. Settled performance comes from that listing's daily bars; assets, allocations, concentration, and holdings come from the linked Form NPORT-P report. Missing commercial facts such as an expense ratio or benchmark stay unavailable rather than being inferred from portfolio data.
Each figure a tool returns carries its provenance — the form, filing date, and period — so you can trace it back to the document it came from.
Prices come from a market-data feed on two separate lanes, and it matters which one you're reading:
- End-of-day bars — the daily OHLCV history, written once a session has settled. Customer-facing history, latest-price ranges, and technical indicators exclude zero-volume carry-forward candles because they do not establish a traded market price.
- Live intraday quotes — consolidated SIP last trade and bid/ask for an active US listing. API/MCP readers receive real-time data on Pro and 15-minute-delayed data on Plus; Free covers end-of-day data only and its intraday calls are declined with an upgrade link. The portal remains live on every plan. Each reading names its market session and expected session and marks an older-session reading stale. A ticker with no reading is reported as having none rather than being filled with a placeholder price.
The two never silently substitute for each other: a current-session quote may enrich a stored close, while a stale quote is labelled historical and customer summaries fall back to the most recent traded close. Intraday readings are not written into daily history. Reach them through GetLiveQuote, /v1/stocks/{ticker}/quote, /v1/quotes, or /v1/stream.
No heuristics
We never classify financial data by pattern-matching. A company is a REIT because its SIC code says so; a security is common stock because the filing's security type says so — never because of how a ticker or name looks. When the authoritative field is missing, the value is omitted, never guessed.
Fundamentals are as-reported
Fundamentals come from tagged XBRL — the company's own numbers. A metric with a missing input is excluded from a calculation rather than filled in. Non-GAAP measures (adjusted EPS, FFO/AFFO) are read from the company's own reconciliation and labelled with its verbatim measure name; they're never compared against GAAP actuals.
As-reported vs derived
Most of what a tool returns is as-reported — the exact figure from a filing, with its provenance. Some outputs are derived on top of that data, and we say so:
- Composite scores — the short-squeeze and insider-sentiment scores are peer-relative 0–100 ranks computed from the underlying figures (short interest, days to cover, net insider buying), not values a company reports.
- Short-interest estimates — the nowcast predicts the immediate next official FINRA settlement from eligible daily data available through its stated as-of date. It is always labelled as a model estimate, names the settlement and expected FINRA publication date, and stays separate from the official short-interest history. A missing estimate stays missing rather than being filled with a fallback.
- Index outlooks — current constituents and observed changes come from disclosed tracking-fund holdings. Outlooks apply supported published rules company by company and disclose unsupported rules: S&P results are screens because its committee decides membership, while Russell and Nasdaq-100 results apply their published rankings as projections. They are not index-provider announcements.
- Narrative extractions — KPIs, non-GAAP bridges, and going-concern flags come from written filings; customer concentration uses supported dimensioned XBRL directly when available and otherwise uses the filing narrative. Forward guidance can also come from calls, while earnings briefs and insights come from transcripts. Each narrative extraction is checked by an independent verifier before it's published and carries the verbatim source quote, so you can confirm it against the document.
Split adjustment
Stored daily prices and volumes are split-adjusted, not dividend-adjusted: once a captured split reconciles, the listing's stored history is restated onto the post-split share basis. Rows carry no per-row basis marker: until a split's restatement is confirmed, bars on either side of it can be on different bases, so the 52-week ranges and most return windows start at a captured split rather than compare bars across it. The REST splits endpoint reports which splits have a confirmed restatement. Share counts and 13F positions are restated across captured splits so they're comparable across time. Same-series ratios can use raw filed counts, but totals or percentages spanning sibling listings restate each exact class first because their split histories can differ.
Fiscal periods
Periods are handled precisely: a trailing-twelve-month (TTM) figure sums the four most recent discrete quarters (not a year-to-date total), and every figure is tagged with its fiscal year and period. The Claude Skill captures the conventions we recommend an agent follow.
Freshness
Data is ingested continuously as it's published — new filings, prices, and disclosures are picked up as they land. A quarter's 13F view stays "combined" (funds that haven't filed yet carry their prior-quarter positions) for the 45 days filers have to report.