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Companies and corporate actions

A dividend is declared by a company about its shares; a filing is made by a company, about itself or about another's. The lake names the company as a subject of its own, beside the security, so a reader can ask either. This page explains the company kind, the record a company is named by, and corporate actions, the first of which, the declared cash dividend, the options models read.

The company kind

A company is a platform record with an ENT- ID, as an instrument is an INS- record: its current name, its identifiers, each with its validity window (cik, the SEC's Central Index Key, and lei, the Legal Entity Identifier), and its former names, each with the dates it was used. The platform mints it from EDGAR's submissions by CIK or from GLEIF by LEI. A filer the platform cannot type as a company, such as a natural person, is never minted.

Your deployment's instrument store keeps each company record it is answered, every version its own row. A data plugin resolves one with resolve_company: by its ENT- ID, or by a cik or an lei as of a date, against each identifier's window. Two companies named at once are refused.

A miss asks the platform. Resolved by identifiers and not held, the store asks the platform, sending only the cik or lei in a scheme on the licence list, never a name. A company the platform matches or mints is kept and answers. One not matched, or a platform not reached, leaves the resolve a miss, refused naming identifiers, nothing kept; the next miss asks again. A miss by ENT- ID alone is not asked about.

A subject's role

A row's subject may carry its role (SubjectRef.role), so one row can name a security and its issuer, or a holder and what it holds: subject, holder, held, issuer, reporting_owner, filer, underlying or rater. A read naming a subject in a role is answered only rows that name it so.

In the Python SDK a subject is meridian.SubjectRef with role=, and from SDK 0.33.0 the typed operations take only it (see 0.32.3 to 0.33.0).

Corporate actions

A data plugin records each corporate action a company declares (record_corporate_actions), its subjects the security and, beside it, its issuer as a company in the issuer role. Today the one kind is a declared cash dividend, CORPORATE_ACTION_KIND_CASH_DIVIDEND:

Field What
amount_per_share As declared, a Money resolved to its currency's cash instrument
declared_date, ex_date, record_date, payment_date Each required, a plain date as the declaration states it: the plugin never infers one
rule The rule the plugin read it by, a definition and its version
filing The filing it was declared in, its accession and form, where given

A correction is the next version of its row key. Every version is heard as corporate_actions_recorded, never conflated, by reporting and signal. portfolio, reporting and signal read them (list_corporate_actions), by subject, by kind and by a range of the kind's date (a cash dividend's ex-date), point in time by recorded or published time; or every version recorded after a watermark, whatever its dates.

The options models read them. The analytics component reads an underlying's declared cash dividends for a chain, and the American model prices on the share less its escrowed dividends: a dividend going ex before an expiry moves that series' model price, and one going ex after it changes nothing. The dividends' dataset is named in the answer's provenance (see Options measures).

The rest of the filings slice

Beside declared dividends, the lake keeps the rest of the filings slice: filings (record_filings, list_filings, among them an 8-K's earnings date), reported facts (record_reported_facts, list_reported_facts), holdings reports and holdings (record_holdings_reports, record_holdings, list_holdings) and rating actions (record_rating_actions, list_rating_actions). The data suite's cases about them carry about: filings, holdings and ratings, so a plugin whose source presents none names them not presented. See The lake: filings, quality states and data use.