Trust

Finance research needs traceable inputs. Finance CLI is built around a few practical rules:

• Source handles: filing commands return accessions, URLs, report names, sections, offsets, or provider names when available.
• Explicit calculations: formula commands include the inputs and method used.
• Scriptable results: commands return predictable JSON with ok, data, error, and warnings fields.
• Local credentials: API keys are read from environment variables at runtime and are not written by the CLI.
• No telemetry: the CLI does not track commands, symbols, queries, or usage.
• Freshness: provider-backed commands reflect the source response at runtime; there is no general stale-cache layer.

Citation Policy

Agents should preserve citation fields whenever a command returns them:

Evidence type	Cite fields
SEC filings	accession, accession_no, url, form, report_name, section
Documents	source, url, path, page, start_char, end_char, match_id
Market data	symbol, provider, source, date, timestamp
News/transcripts/IR	url, source, published_at, quarter, speaker, filing_url
Calculations	command name, explicit inputs, and method

Never present market data without provider/source and date/timestamp fields when available. Treat Yahoo, FMP, SEC, GDELT, transcript pages, and company IR pages as source-specific records, not ground truth.

Agent Failure Policy

• If ok=false, surface the returned error and do not fabricate data.
• If ok=true and a result array is empty, report the source returned no matching rows.
• If warnings are present, keep them with the answer and decide whether a narrower follow-up command is needed.
• If a provider key or local dependency is unavailable, let the error remain visible to the caller.