Dear All,
We found a problem with StaleStmt as was correctly reported by SUpirate1081 in this post . Simply put it was meaningless since around the beginning of the year. It went unnoticed because StaleStmt was not part of our tests prior to new releases (we will address this to make sure it does not happen again).
StaleStmt was introduced to address the delay in Compustat in processing SEC filings. Compustat still utilizes a lot of human oversight, so they prioritize the process by market cap, with companies like SP500 usually processed the same day, and smaller cap companies having considerable delay (even 2-3 weeks). Since there’s not much we can do about this we introduce this flag so you could be alerted.
Very sorry about this. The fix is now live. Running a screen for the SP500 with one rule “StaleStmt=true” now looks much better. Hardly any companies in the SP500 are ever “stale”. PLease see image below.
