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MISC / UTILITY
PITSeries(pit_series)
Full Description


PITSeries() gives the point-in-time version of a revised FRED series.

By point-in-time, we mean that the entire revision history is represented, so it can be observed in the state it would have been for any given date. For FRED PIT series, the values are provided with effective dates when the series is retrieved, so our PIT series should exactly represent what is available on the FRED API.

There are certain FRED series that are already point-in-time, so do not use PITSeries() with the following 5 series:
##HVACANCY
##RVACANCY
##INFLEXP
##GOLD
##OIL

In addition, all the interest and treasuries FRED series (##CORPAAA, ##FEDFUNDS, ##MORT30Y, ##UST3MO, etc.) do not need PITSeries.

If PITSeries is used in conjunction with any of the above series, it will return an error message.

Here is an example of a possible use case:

SMA(4, 0, PITSeries(##RGDP)) * SMA(12, 0, PITSeries(##CPI))

You can adjust minimum market cap or minimum sales in universes for long backtests by this factor. So if your minimum market cap is $100 million in 1999, you would use this series to calculate the minimum market cap in subsequent years.