Retiring a symbol meant delete_ticker or bootstrap_universe(prune_missing),
both of which cascade through OHLCV, setups and scores. That destroys exactly
the history four research documents already apologise for: today's tracked
universe projected backward is survivorship-biased, and hard-deleting every
delisted name is what causes it. Keeping the rows preserves the option to fix
that — it does not fix it, which needs the replay to model a delisting as an
exit event.
tickers gains delisted_on / delisted_reason (migration 032). NULL means
actively traded.
The filter is opt-in via ticker_service.active_only rather than folded into a
shared getter: the registry and admin views deliberately keep delisted rows so
the delisting is visible, and a silent default would undo that. Applied to the
live path only — scanner, momentum ranking, scoring, breadth, fundamentals
candidates, SEC universe, earnings import, ingestion loops. run_backtest keeps
them on purpose.
Detection runs off OHLCV staleness, not off the SEC fundamentals import: that
importer stalls for days on unrelated Company-Facts gaps and would take
detection down with it. On a stale symbol the scheduler asks SEC for a Form
25/25-NSE/15 and retires it only on a hit, so a halt or a rename (SATS->ECHO)
keeps the existing warning. The probe waits 3 stale days so a market-data
outage cannot turn into one SEC request per symbol per run.
Safe to automate because it is reversible: clear_delisted un-retires a false
positive, where a delete had already taken the history.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
