Software is usually built to always return something. Financial and regulatory data punishes that instinct, because the substitute values look exactly like real ones once they are in a table.
A missing value is not a zero
If a filing does not state a price, the price is unknown. Writing zero in that cell turns an unknown into a claim — and a claim that will be averaged, summed and charted as though someone had reported it.
Every number on this site is either a value that a source published or an em dash. Sorting, totals and aggregates skip the dashes rather than treating them as zeros, and where a total covers only part of a column, the count of rows it covers is shown alongside.
An unpublished rate is not the previous one
Reference rates exist only on the publishing institution's working days. Asked to convert an amount on a Sunday, our converter says no such rate was published and names the currency and the date.
Carrying the previous business day's figure forward would produce a result that looks correct, is off by a day, and cannot be checked against any publication. The same applies to any series: gaps stay gaps.
No match found is not a clearance
A sanctions search reports what matched the spelling you typed in the list versions we hold. An empty result is a statement about that search, not about a person's legal position.
The distinction is not pedantic. Treating an empty screening result as a clearance is the single most consequential misreading available anywhere on this site, which is why the wording of the empty state is fixed and never softened.
No data is not an example
Where a tool needs data that is not in the database, it shows an empty state explaining what is missing. It does not show a worked example with invented numbers.
Sample data has a way of being screenshotted, quoted and eventually believed. The dividend calendar here is empty for exactly this reason: no source currently connected publishes a machine-readable dividend calendar, so the tool says so instead of demonstrating itself on a company that never declared what it appears to have declared.