Miss Log — GLOOMBORG

The miss log

Every entry below is a real failure, published with its cause and its fix. Most products delete these. We keep them, because the track record of honest dealing is the only moat that compounds.

Nobody publishes their own losing backtests. That's copyable in a week. What is not copyable is three years of them.

The silent-lie traps — well-formed answers that were quietly wrong

The pattern that runs through all four: each one returned a correct-looking result that was wrong, and none announced itself. They are caught by refusing to publish a number that cannot justify itself.

Miss	What happened	Class	Status
BLS row cap	A 10-year request silently omitted all of 2026 (rows counted forward from the start year).	truncation	fixed
SEC EDGAR dead tag	Apple stopped filing `us-gaap:Revenues` in 2018; asking for it returned nine valid rows ending 2018 as if current.	staleness	fixed
RRX step-function z-score	The fed funds rate is held flat for months, so a 250-day standard deviation collapsed and the first move produced a z of +10.617 — which dominated the whole composite. Arithmetically correct, substantively meaningless.	plausibility	fixed
NASA sentinels	`−999` missing-month markers posed as temperatures.	sentinels	fixed

Miss

What happened

Class

Status

BLS row cap

A 10-year request silently omitted all of 2026 (rows counted forward from the start year).

truncation

fixed

SEC EDGAR dead tag

Apple stopped filing us-gaap:Revenues in 2018; asking for it returned nine valid rows ending 2018 as if current.

staleness

fixed

RRX step-function z-score

The fed funds rate is held flat for months, so a 250-day standard deviation collapsed and the first move produced a z of +10.617 — which dominated the whole composite. Arithmetically correct, substantively meaningless.

plausibility

fixed

NASA sentinels

−999 missing-month markers posed as temperatures.

sentinels

fixed

Our own bugs — the same disease, built by us

Miss	What happened	Status
AT&T false zero	A missing capex tag was read as 0.0, printing a measured-looking zero instead of "we couldn't find it".	fixed
Intel denominator collapse	Buybacks went to zero and dividends were cut, so a ratio printed 25.32 — arithmetically right, useless.	fixed
Over-declaration	Coverage printed 111.7% then 133.3% as "complete" — a coverage above 100% is always a declaration error, never a counting artefact.	fixed
Month 13	NASA's annual average (`202613`) was read as a real month, so every year ended with a fake 13th month that sorted after December.	fixed

Miss

What happened

Status

AT&T false zero

A missing capex tag was read as 0.0, printing a measured-looking zero instead of "we couldn't find it".

fixed

Intel denominator collapse

Buybacks went to zero and dividends were cut, so a ratio printed 25.32 — arithmetically right, useless.

fixed

Over-declaration

Coverage printed 111.7% then 133.3% as "complete" — a coverage above 100% is always a declaration error, never a counting artefact.

fixed

Month 13

NASA's annual average (202613) was read as a real month, so every year ended with a fake 13th month that sorted after December.

fixed

The operational misses

Miss	What happened	Status
Newsletter email leak	Any paying customer could export the full subscriber list, including plain email addresses. There was no real admin gate.	fixed
The 62-second health check	One flaky upstream (FRED) made `/v1/health` take 62 seconds and took two engines down with it. Now bounded to a few seconds with last-known + stale states.	fixed

Miss

What happened

Status

Newsletter email leak

Any paying customer could export the full subscriber list, including plain email addresses. There was no real admin gate.

fixed

The 62-second health check

One flaky upstream (FRED) made /v1/health take 62 seconds and took two engines down with it. Now bounded to a few seconds with last-known + stale states.

fixed

The rule that catches all of them

Nobody catches these by being careful. The author of the guards wrote the z-score bug himself, an hour after writing guards for the other three. They are caught by one refusal: a number that cannot state its basis does not go out.