Every financial statement exists in at least two versions: the number a company first told the market, and whatever number ends up in today's database after amendments, reclassifications, and restatements. If you're building a fundamental backtest, confusing the two is one of the quieter ways to inflate a strategy's historical returns — quieter than survivorship bias, but just as real.
This article works through what "as-reported" and "restated" actually mean, why a backtest that uses the wrong one is training on information that didn't exist yet, and how a point-in-time (PIT) dataset like Tradevo Data represents both so you can choose deliberately instead of by accident.
As-reported: what the market actually saw
As-reported (also called original or first-filed) is the value disclosed in the filing that made it public — for us, a 10-K (or 10-K/A). It's stamped with a date: the moment that number entered the public record via SEC EDGAR. Before that date, no market participant could have known it. That's the entire premise of point-in-time data: every fact carries a timestamp for when it became knowable, not just what the fact eventually became.
Restated: what the number is today
