How to Prepare an RWA Research Page for Correction
A lightweight workflow for recording source changes, disputed details and update history.
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Research pages about real-world assets go stale in a specific way: the issuer publishes a restatement, a custodian changes, or a reporting quarter is revised, and the page keeps describing the previous state with no visible sign that anything moved.
A correction page is not an apology. It is the record that lets a reader tell the difference between a number that was wrong and a number that was true at the time and has since changed.
Decide which kind of change you are recording
The distinction determines everything else, including where the correction goes.
- An error. The page said something the source never supported, or supported it incorrectly. The fix is a correction with a stated reason.
- A source change. The page was accurate when written and the underlying document has since been revised. Nothing was wrong; the world moved.
- A clarification. The page was right but ambiguous, and readers drew a wrong conclusion from it. The fix is wording, not a retraction.
Most update traffic on RWA pages is the second kind, and treating it as the first kind damages credibility unnecessarily. An issuer that revises a quarterly attestation has not made an error, and describing it as one is its own inaccuracy.
The four fields every correction carries
Whichever kind it is, the entry needs these, in this order:
- What changed. The specific figure, name, date or status, stated as a before-and-after pair.
- Where the authority is. The document, filing or announcement that carries the new value, with a link that resolves to that document rather than to a summary of it.
- When the change happened. The date the source published it, which is often earlier than the date you noticed it.
- What the page said before. The prior wording, so the change is auditable rather than merely asserted.
The fourth field is the one people skip, and skipping it is what makes a correction page useless: without the previous value, a later reader cannot tell whether the page was corrected once or quietly rewritten several times.
Where the correction belongs
Two placements, and they serve different purposes.
- An inline note at the point of change, dated, naming the source. This is what a reader who lands on the page from search needs, because they arrive at the current text and have no idea anything moved.
- A single dated log at the bottom of the page, listing every change in reverse chronological order. This is what a reader checking your reliability needs, because it shows the full history rather than the current state alone.
A page that carries only the log forces the reader to reconcile two documents. A page that carries only an inline note hides the pattern. Do both, with the same wording in each, so the two never disagree.
Verify before you publish the correction
The failure mode here is a correction that is itself wrong, which is worse than the original error because it damages a record that was accurate.
Check that the new value is attributed to the right entity and the right period. Restatements frequently revise a prior quarter rather than restate the current one, and a page updated with the revised prior figure labelled as the current quarter is a new error with a correction notice attached to it.
Check the unit and the currency while you are there. Restatements often change scale, and a figure that moved by three orders of magnitude usually moved units, not value.
Do not silently edit
A reader who bookmarked a page six months ago has no way to know it changed unless the change is marked. Silent editing makes every prior citation unverifiable, and for a page whose subject is a reported figure, an unverifiable citation is the thing a reader is relying on.
If a change is too small to annotate, ask whether it is small enough to be invisible on a research page. Usually it is not, because a reader comparing your page against a filing will see the difference and conclude that one of the two is unreliable.
This guide is informational and does not replace the issuer’s own filings or attestations.