Alignment

The time series in the Exabel platform are indexed by dates. However, in many time series the data points represent not the value at a specific date, but the value for an entire fiscal period. It is then necessary to determine, for each fiscal period, the date which represents that fiscal period. This can be done in multiple ways, which we call alignments.

A number of signals are able to produce data with different alignments, and these signals accept an alignment argument. Such an argument can have the following values:

alignment	Description
`end`	A fiscal period is represented by the last date in the period.
`start`	A fiscal period is represented by the first date in the period.
`month-end`	A fiscal period is represented by the last date in the period, rounded off to the end of a nearby calendar month. This is the alignment used in the FactSet data, but unfortunately, the rounding rule is not uniform across the FactSet datasets. In the FactSet Fundamentals dataset, a date is rounded off to the end of the previous month if it is the 9th or earlier of a month, and it is rounded off to the end of the same month if it is the 10th or later of a month. In the Estimates dataset, the rounding does not follow a strict rule. For FactSet signals, we honour the alignment used by FactSet, which means that `fs_actual` and `fs_fundamental` may produce time series with different dates for the same company. For non-FactSet signals, we use the deterministic rule used by the FactSet Fundamentals dataset.
`publish`	Publication dates: the date on which the results for the fiscal period are reported.
`report`	Report dates: the date on which the report impacted trading. This can differ from the publication date - when a company publishes results after the market close, the report date will be the next trading day. For future fiscal periods, the publication and report dates will be the same, as we do not know whether publication will be before or after trading hours.

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Note
For backwards compatibility, the old alignment names afp, fp, pd and rd are still supported as aliases for end, month-end, publish and report respectively.