Late filers

So the financial report project went to a strange place. I was building a panel of company fundamentals from SEC filings, and I kept the filing date of every report, because I wanted to know what was known at what time. Then I noticed something simple. Companies with bad numbers file late. Not always, but often enough. So if I take a snapshot in the middle of a quarter, the companies that already reported are the ones with good news, and the "average" I calculate is not the average of the market, it is the average of the early birds.

This is not a bug in the data. Every record is correct. It is a bug in the timing. I do not have a fix yet, but I think this is the real project now, more than the fraud detector.