Backtest on what was knowable, not on what is known now

Two things put the future into a historical fundamentals dataset. A fiscal period ends weeks or months before its 10-K or 10-Q is filed, so a figure stamped to its period end was not public on that date. And companies amend and restate, so a dataset that overwrites the original with the correction serves the corrected figure for dates on which only the original existed.

Survivorship adds a third distortion. A universe built only from companies that still file today leaves out the ones that were delisted, acquired or taken private, and the backtest is wrong in a direction you cannot see from inside its results.

• As-of retrieval on every plan, including Free. Query any date and Arche resolves the figures using accepted filing dates, returning what was on file then.
• Restatements add a version instead of overwriting. The original stays queryable, with the filing it came from.
• Point-in-time time series. One request returns a metric across a company’s history, with every point anchored to the as-of date you pass.
• Delisted, acquired and taken-private registrants are retained in the corpus.
• Each as-of snapshot returns a snapshot_hash, and replay tokens reproduce a past response exactly, so a backtest can be re-run and checked later.

The point-in-time research guide recommends storing, with every model run, the company identifier, the query boundary, any fiscal or statement filters, and the statement_version_id values returned. Compute the boundary for each decision date first, query with an as_of route anchored to it, and only then join market or model data.

From the time-series documentation. as_of_date anchors the whole series to a historical boundary, so every point is the value that was knowable on that date rather than today’s restated value.

curl -X GET "https://api.arche.fi/v1/edgar/companies/0000789019/metrics/REVENUE/time-series?as_of_date=2024-03-31&period_type=annual&page_size=50" \
  -H "X-Api-Key: $ARCHE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Accept: application/json"

Without as_of_date the series reflects the current best understanding of history, which is the correct answer to a different question. For a whole statement rather than one metric, GET /v1/edgar/as-of/{date}/financials/{cik} returns the snapshot with its snapshot_hash.

Any plan can query any as-of date. The Free plan covers any 25 companies you choose; Developer and above cover the full corpus of 17,000 companies, including delisted and acquired registrants. Universe point-in-time snapshots (up to 50 CIKs per request) start at Growth.

Current prices and limits are on the pricing page.

Documentation

• Point-in-time research guide
• Restatement drift guide
• Time series, point-in-time and as-reported
• Versioning: latest vs as_of