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Canli Capital

Research

Repurchase and issuance flow: no-return SEC feasibility protocol

By , Canli Capital

Declared: 2026-08-16
Return data: prohibited
Hypotheses spent: zero
Family trial account: corporate_equity_supply
Prior return configurations: three (eq_net_issuance)
Minimum family trial count if one completed-flow return identity is opened: four
Independent-sleeve count: prohibited; this is a same-family measurement refinement

Question

Can completed repurchases and completed issuance be reconstructed from information available at each SEC filing acceptance time, with enough coverage and semantic stability to justify exactly one later return preregistration?

This audit measures data feasibility only. It may inspect filing metadata, XBRL facts, Item 703 tables, taxonomies, contexts, amendments, and extraction errors. It may not read prices, returns, future delistings, signals, positions, portfolio correlations, or performance statistics.

Frozen source and sample

  • Official SEC company_tickers.json, Submissions API, Company Facts API, and immutable filing documents. No vendor-derived fundamentals.
  • Forms 10-Q, 10-Q/A, 10-K, and 10-K/A filed from 2013-01-01 through 2025-12-31.
  • A deterministic 600-CIK schema sample: canonical current SEC ticker rows, one row per CIK, ordered by sha256("repurchase_issuance_flow_v1|CIK##########"), first 600. This current roster is allowed only for schema feasibility and cannot become a historical return universe.
  • A deterministic 240-filing Item 703 document sample from those CIKs, balanced by filing year where documents exist. Selection is by the same sealed hash rule, never by extraction success.
  • Every raw response stores URL, retrieval time, byte count, SHA-256, CIK, accession, acceptance time, form, fiscal period, taxonomy tag, unit, start/end dates, filed, frame, and source file.

Frozen fact families

The parser records, but does not combine or optimize, these standard-tag families:

  • completed cash repurchases: PaymentsForRepurchaseOfCommonStock and direct successor tags with identical taxonomy definitions;
  • completed common-stock issuance cash proceeds: ProceedsFromIssuanceOfCommonStock and direct successor tags with identical definitions;
  • shares issued or repurchased/retired during the period where standard tags exist;
  • weighted-average and period-end shares only as reconciliation diagnostics;
  • stock-option exercise proceeds, share-based compensation, acquisition consideration, stock splits, tender offers, and non-cash issuance as explicit contamination flags, never silently merged into ordinary issuance.

Custom extension tags are preserved and counted but cannot be auto-mapped from text similarity. Any successor mapping requires identical definitions and a published mapping table.

Point-in-time rules

  1. A fact becomes knowable at the filing's accepted timestamp, never at fiscal period end.
  2. The first accepted filing is the historical value. An amendment is a new state from its own acceptance time and cannot rewrite earlier observations.
  3. Cumulative year-to-date duration facts may be quarterized only by differencing facts that were both knowable at that decision time, share the same fiscal year and unit, and pass context lineage. Missing predecessors remain missing.
  4. Company Facts frames are not used as historical truth because their “last filed” aggregation can incorporate later submissions.
  5. Restatements, duplicate contexts, dimensions, unit changes, and conflicting tags are explicit failure states. No best-looking value is selected.
  6. Item 703 tables are parsed from the immutable filing document tied to the accession. The vacated 2023 daily disclosure format is not assumed.

Locked gates

All gates must pass before a return protocol can be written:

  1. 100% raw-response hashes and accession/acceptance lineage.
  2. At least 95% of sampled periodic filings join uniquely to SEC submissions metadata.
  3. At least 70% of sampled issuer-years expose either a standard completed-repurchase cash fact or an accession-bound Item 703 table; Wilson 95% lower bound must be at least 65%.
  4. At least 60% of sampled issuer-years expose a standard completed-issuance cash/share fact or an explicit contamination-resolved reconciliation; Wilson 95% lower bound at least 55%.
  5. At least 85% Item 703 extraction precision and 80% recall on a frozen 60-document hand-label set selected before parser evaluation.
  6. At least 95% of accepted facts have unambiguous unit, period, and form context.
  7. Amendment replay is slice-invariant: truncating the corpus before an amendment reproduces the exact pre-amendment state hash.
  8. Quarterization fails closed whenever a predecessor, unit, context, or fiscal-year identity is ambiguous; zero is never imputed.
  9. Stock splits, stock compensation, acquisition issuance, tender offers, and custom tags each receive explicit coverage/error counts.
  10. Return data opened and return identities spent both remain exactly zero.

Decisions

  • PASS_TO_RETURN_PREREGISTRATION: every gate passes and the complete manifest is hashed.
  • DATA_GATED: coverage or semantic lineage is inadequate but a named vendor could resolve it.
  • KILL_FEASIBILITY: actual repurchases and issuance cannot be separated reproducibly enough to support the economic identity.
  • REJECT_GOVERNANCE: any return data was opened, the deterministic samples changed, or a missing value was inferred from future information.

Passing permits one separately sealed family-wise return identity. It does not choose a sign, horizon, universe, threshold, or sleeve weight and does not create an ALPHAC sleeve.

Identity-overlap decision

artifacts/feasibility/repurchase_issuance_flow/identity_overlap_audit.json reconciles this proposal against the historical eq_net_issuance campaign. The prior signal measured the year-over-year change in split-adjusted shares with the same long-repurchaser/short-issuer economic thesis. Three distinct configurations are already in the union ledgers; results include a null, Sharpe -0.1289, and Sharpe -0.3113 with DSR 0.00010, while a separate source-correct full-window rerun reported +0.1481. That instability is prior family evidence, not a clean slate.

Completed cash flows are a distinct and potentially better measurement, but they remain in the same corporate-equity-supply family. A later return protocol, if feasibility passes, must inherit all prior trials, residualize against the frozen broad issuance signal, prove positive mean-zero marginal book contribution, and use an untouched holdout. It may qualify only as a same-family replacement or refinement and cannot count toward the ten new independent sleeves.

Implemented pipeline and current state

The complete no-return collection, semantic-audit, blind-extraction, and combined-decision path is implemented and covered by 48 focused tests. Official SEC collection and semantics are now complete. The family is stopped at the intended blind-label gate: all 240 frozen documents are sealed, no document has been parsed, and none of the 60 labels has been opened by the parser.

  1. scripts/build_repurchase_issuance_manifest.py creates the deterministic 600-CIK sample and binds it to the raw SEC ticker-map hash.
  2. scripts/collect_repurchase_issuance_companyfacts.py stores deterministic gzip responses, preserves every original and amended fact, writes immutable Parquet parts, and can resume by parser-version-qualified CIK identity.
  3. scripts/collect_repurchase_issuance_submissions.py independently collects all eligible periodic filings so coverage is measured against real filing denominators rather than only companies with convenient tags.
  4. scripts/audit_repurchase_issuance_companyfacts.py verifies both collection seals and part hashes, joins facts to accessions, computes context completeness and Wilson bounds, and can return only ITEM703_AUDIT_REQUIRED or DATA_GATED. It cannot pass full feasibility.
  5. scripts/audit_repurchase_issuance_semantics.py independently replays amendment prefixes, proves slice invariance, quarterizes only same-year/same-unit/same-context facts known by that acceptance time, records every fail-closed reason, and reports all contamination categories.
  6. scripts/build_repurchase_item703_manifest.py creates immutable year-balanced 240-document and 60-label samples from completed periodic filings, excluding amendments from selection.
  7. scripts/collect_repurchase_item703_documents.py retrieves only the frozen filing documents, verifies the exact accession set, and stores deterministic gzip bodies and immutable statuses.
  8. The 60 frozen documents are labeled independently in labels.csv. The labeler records table presence, month-row count, total-row presence, and notes without opening parser output.
  9. scripts/seal_repurchase_item703_labels.py validates exact identities and complete labels, refuses to run after any parser output exists, and binds the labels to the parser-source hash.
  10. scripts/parse_repurchase_item703_documents.py verifies every raw hash and the pre-evaluation parser hash, parses all 240 documents without reading labels, preserves tender-offer mention counts, and writes one immutable result.
  11. scripts/audit_repurchase_item703_extraction.py opens the labels only after parsing, reports the full confusion matrix plus row-shape diagnostics, and enforces precision at least 85% and recall at least 80%. Passing still cannot admit the family or authorize a return probe.
  12. scripts/audit_repurchase_issuance_feasibility.py revalidates every current part against the full cryptographic chain, computes conservative union coverage on the frozen document-sample issuer-years, applies every locked empirical and governance gate, and is the only stage allowed to emit PASS_TO_RETURN_PREREGISTRATION. Any missing or failed gate exits nonzero.

Company Facts parser v3 also makes semantic exclusions explicit. Stock compensation, option exercise proceeds, acquisition issuance, mixed common/preferred facts, repurchase authorizations, and split diagnostics have separate families and cannot count as direct ordinary issuance. Balance-sheet CommonStockSharesIssued is reconciliation data, not a completed-period flow. Custom extensions stay in immutable raw responses and receive explicit namespace, tag, and row counts, but are never mapped by text similarity. The parser records official Company Facts 404s as terminal not_available_404 outcomes, never as successful payloads and never as retryable silence. Those issuers remain in the frozen denominator.

Empirical checkpoint: stopped before parser evaluation

  • The SEC ticker manifest contains exactly 600 unique CIKs. Company Facts returned 520 payloads; 80 manifested issuers had reproducible official 404s, and collection had zero unresolved errors. All 600 identities are explicitly accounted for.
  • The independent submissions collection contains 15,009 periodic filings. Of 150,570 relevant facts, 99.993% join to an accession and 99.489% have complete unit/period/form context.
  • Standard tags alone cover 46.45% of 3,903 issuer-years for completed repurchases (Wilson lower bound 44.89%) and 43.35% for completed issuance (Wilson lower bound 41.80%). These figures do not clear the locked combined coverage gates; they prove the Item 703 lane is necessary.
  • Amendment replay is slice-invariant across 2,407 amendment facts. Quarterization derives 35,792 quarters and fails closed on 19,087 facts, including 18,321 missing predecessors; zero values are imputed.
  • The frozen Item 703 sample is 240/240 collected with exact accession identity. The year-balanced 60-document labels.csv is blank by design. No parser output or return data exists.

The only authorized next action is an independent reviewer completing artifacts/feasibility/repurchase_issuance_flow/item703/labels.csv from the linked filing documents without inspecting parser output. The seal command must run before parsing. Until then the honest decision is BLIND_ITEM703_LABELING_REQUIRED, not pass, kill, or return authorization.

uv run python scripts/build_repurchase_issuance_manifest.py
uv run python scripts/collect_repurchase_issuance_companyfacts.py
uv run python scripts/collect_repurchase_issuance_submissions.py
uv run python scripts/audit_repurchase_issuance_companyfacts.py
uv run python scripts/audit_repurchase_issuance_semantics.py
uv run python scripts/build_repurchase_item703_manifest.py
uv run python scripts/collect_repurchase_item703_documents.py
# Complete the frozen labels.csv independently; do not run or inspect parser output.
uv run python scripts/seal_repurchase_item703_labels.py
uv run python scripts/parse_repurchase_item703_documents.py
uv run python scripts/audit_repurchase_item703_extraction.py
uv run python scripts/audit_repurchase_issuance_feasibility.py