Delisted

Also seen as: delisting, dead ticker

Why does Fincanva keep delisted instruments?

Because a backtest that can only pick from instruments still trading today is a backtest of the winners. Every company that went bankrupt, was bought out, or was dropped from an index vanishes from a survivors-only catalogue, and every loss it caused vanishes with it. Keeping the delisted instrument means a backtest running through 2008 can hold a bank that did not come out of 2008, and record the damage where it actually happened.

The distortion this guards against is called survivorship bias: the results you get when history is judged only through the companies still around to be judged. Instruments leave the market for opposite reasons — some fail, others are acquired at a premium — so a survivors-only dataset does not simply shift results down or up. What it does is quietly remove the outcomes a strategy would have had to live through, which is why a backtest built on one cannot be trusted as a record of what the rules would have done.

What does point-in-time index membership mean?

Point-in-time index membership means an index's constituents are recorded as they stood on each date, not only as they stand today. For each index, Fincanva's data keeps when an instrument joined it and when it left, so reading the same index at 2010 and at 2026 returns two different lists — the earlier one containing companies later removed from the index, and leaving out companies that had not yet joined it. That recorded history is what separates an index as it really was from the index as it looks now, which is the distinction survivorship bias turns on. Index lists and point-in-time constituents is the full account of how that membership history is kept and why it changes a backtest.

Defaults in Fincanva

• Delisted instruments stay in the catalogue and stay searchable and selectable; the Delisted badge is how you tell them apart in search results.
• The badge is tinted as a caution rather than an error — it is information about the instrument, not a problem with your strategy.
• Delisted is independent of Tradable and Not tradable: an instrument can have been perfectly tradable for years and still be delisted now.
• The whole-market universe includes delisted instruments, so a screener is not silently limited to today's survivors.
• A delisted instrument has a last price date, and no data exists after it — its history simply ends there.

Worked example

You backtest a US large-cap screen across 2007–2009, and in 2007 the screen picks up a large financial company that meets its rules. That company fails in 2008 and is delisted; its ticker does not exist today. Because Fincanva keeps the instrument and its price history, the backtest holds it through the collapse and the loss lands in the results — the drawdown you see includes it.

Now imagine the same screen run against a catalogue containing only companies still listed today. The failed bank is simply absent, so the identical rules appear to have produced a smoother, better outcome — not because the strategy was better, but because the loser had been deleted from history. That gap between the two runs is exactly what keeping delisted instruments removes.