Helious stamps every number with a timestamp and a provenance state, and captures economic releases seconds after they cross. When a figure looks missing or stale, it's almost always explainable. Here's how to read it.
Releases land on a schedule, and Helious captures them within seconds of the actual print, not before. If you're staring at a CPI cell a minute ahead of 8:30 ET, it's empty because the number doesn't exist yet, not because it's missing. Check the economic calendar for the exact release time. The same holds for auctions: results post seconds after the Treasury releases them, so a 10-year auction cell stays in its pre-result state until the results actually hit. Forecasts, by contrast, publish roughly a week ahead, so a near-term event may show a forecast well before the actual.
Every data point carries a provenance state and an 'as-of' timestamp. A field that shows a last-known-good value with an older timestamp isn't broken: it's telling you the freshest confirmed figure and exactly when it was captured. That's deliberate: on the desk you want the honest last print with its age, not a blank. So a value with a timestamp is doing its job; a genuinely absent required figure is the only real gap. When in doubt, read the timestamp before assuming the number is lost. Our methodology explains how release figures are sourced and stamped.
Market quotes on the board are stamped with an as-of time and a freshness indicator. Real-time routing keeps the board current to roughly a minute; if a quote's dot reads stale, it usually means the upstream tick stream hiccuped, not that the price vanished. Give it a beat. The next tick clears it. Persistent staleness across the whole board points at your connection or a dropped socket rather than a single symbol.
A refresh re-opens sockets and re-pulls the latest captured state, so it cures a stale display or a dropped feed. It will not conjure a number that hasn't been released yet: if CPI isn't out, no amount of refreshing prints it. Use refresh when the timestamp is clearly older than it should be and the calendar says the data is already out. If the figure is genuinely past its release time, confirmed out elsewhere, and still absent after a refresh, that's the case to report.
