What Fincanva's data coverage figures count

Which instruments do the coverage figures count?

The instrument count covers the three asset types a strategy can hold — Stocks, ETPs and Crypto — and nothing else. Two choices decide what that means:

• Delisted instruments are counted. A company that stopped trading stays in the catalogue with the history it had, and a backtest can hold it for the period it traded, so it belongs in the universe a backtest runs on. Leaving it out would describe a survivors-only catalogue, which is exactly the bias the catalogue is kept to avoid — see delisted.
• Reference series are not counted. Indices, macro indicators, long-run asset-class return series and currency series are in the catalogue to measure against or to feed a simulation, not to be held, so they are outside the investable universe the figure describes. See Tradable and Not tradable and special data series.

What counts as an exchange?

An exchange, in the coverage figure, is a trading venue on which at least one investable instrument is listed. The rule that decides it is whether an instrument trades on a venue at all:

• Crypto and macro series trade on no venue. The data still gives them an exchange label so every record has one, but those labels mark the absence of a venue, and they are not counted.
• The OTC market is counted. Over-the-counter instruments do trade on a venue, even though OTC is a market rather than an exchange in the strictest sense. The rule is "trades on a venue", and OTC meets it, so it is one of the exchanges the figure counts.

The screener's Exchange filter shows fewer options than the exchanges counted, because it groups every European venue into a single EU listed option — see universe facets.

What counts as a country?

A country, in the coverage figure, is the country an investable instrument originates in. Crypto belongs to no country: the data gives it a global origin instead, and that is not counted as a country. The countries counted are the United States and a group of European countries.

How far back does the data reach?

How far back the data reaches depends on what you are looking at: the asset-class index series start in 1793, stocks in 1962 and ETPs in 1978, and each instrument's own history starts at its first price in the data. Three distinctions decide how to read any depth figure:

• Each instrument's history starts at its first price in the data. That is its listing date or the start of the data, whichever is later: an instrument listed before the data begins starts where the data starts, and one listed later has history only from its own listing. A figure for the depth of the catalogue is the start of its deepest histories. The app does not show that first date for an instrument, which matters for a long backtest — see coverage window.
• The asset types start at different points. Stocks, ETPs and crypto each have their own earliest date, and a figure stated for one type is not true of the others.
• Reference series reach much further back than any tradable instrument. A long index or asset-class history is the history of a series you can measure against, not of a stock or ETP you can hold, so its depth never describes the investable universe.

The depth of the data is also not the length of a backtest. A backtest runs from its simulation start year to the latest market close the data holds — see data freshness and frontier.

Which coverage figures does the documentation print?

The documentation prints only the history floors in the section above — where the asset-class index series, stocks and ETPs start — and leaves the counts out. The floors are not typed into the page: they come from the same measurement the Fincanva website publishes, so the two always state the same years, and when that measurement is re-run and finds a different start, the page and the website change together. The counts — instruments, exchanges, countries — change with the catalogue itself: it is refreshed daily, instruments list and delist, and a count copied into a page is wrong from the day the next measurement differs. This page carries the part that does not change — what each figure counts — so that any figure you meet can be read correctly.

Limits and edge cases

• A coverage count is not a match count. The instrument figure covers the whole investable universe; a screener only ever considers what its universe filters leave, so no single screener reaches all of it.
• Counting an exchange says nothing about how many instruments trade there. A venue with one listed instrument counts once, exactly like one with thousands.
• The figures describe the catalogue, not a guarantee about any one instrument. Whether a particular instrument has prices for the dates your backtest covers is a question about that instrument's own coverage window, not about the catalogue's totals.

Related

For what the catalogue keeps and why — delisted names, dated index membership, permanent identifiers — see what data your backtests run on. For why a survivors-only catalogue would flatter every result, see the biases Fincanva helps avoid.