Observation date
The date a value belongs to, as distinct from the date it was published or retrieved.
Updated 2026-07-26
Every series here stores the date the value describes. For a reference rate that is the publication day; for a financial statement it is the period end; for a fund report it is the quarter end.
Retrieval time is stored separately and never substituted for it. A value fetched today can describe a date months ago, and displaying the fetch time as the value's date would misdate the whole series.
Where no value exists for a requested date, the answer is that none exists. Carrying the previous value forward creates a series that looks continuous and is not.
Related terms
5 entries- Disclosure lag
- The gap between the date something happened and the date it became public.
- Fiscal period
- The stretch of time a reported figure covers, which need not line up with the calendar year.
- Indexability threshold
- The minimum amount of real data a page must carry before it is allowed to exist for search engines.
- List snapshot
- One complete downloaded version of a published list, stored with the date the source published it.
- Reference exchange rate
- A daily benchmark rate published by a central bank for information, accounting and statistics.
Where this appears in the data
Written for reading the records published here. This is not a legal, tax or accounting definition, and where a jurisdiction defines the term precisely, that definition governs.