Corporate financial disclosures often unfold over time, with announcements, prepared remarks, and discussion spanning multiple high-frequency return intervals. Financial NLP benchmarks can therefore suffer from a within-event timing mismatch when the prediction target begins before the textual or audio input used by a model could be complete. Chronological train--test splits do not prevent this mismatch, because it occurs inside individual events rather than across samples. We introduce an Availability Contract, which requires a benchmark to state the input boundary, evidence for input availability, the outcome start, and the claims supported by that evidence. We apply this framework to 552 earnings calls from 24 firms. For each call, we hold the return endpoint fixed and compare the previous close, a documentary call-start proxy, and a completion proxy based on reconstructed audio end plus a stipulated processing allowance. At this baseline, moving from the call-start proxy to the completion proxy flips return signs for 9.4% of calls. Holding completion-clock cutpoints fixed, 28.3% change quintile. In an independent release-session analysis of a public earnings-call volatility benchmark, shifting before-market target windows forward by one trading session raises three-day mean squared error by 18.1-21.4% across four frozen prediction streams, while their point rankings remain unchanged. Together, the results show that labels and losses can depend materially on the declared outcome clock even when model rankings appear stable. The Availability Contract makes this assumption explicit and ties post-input claims to the available timing evidence.
Figures & tables
Claim
Permitted interpretation
Event-window association
The return may span the event; interpretation is an event-window association, not post-input attribution.
Proxy-aligned association
A stated completion proxy precedes label start; interpretation is conditional on the proxy.
Verified post-input
Observed input completion, or a defensible upper bound, precedes label start.
Deployability
Point-in-time input, model, order, and execution clocks are observed or conservatively bounded, and costs are modeled.
Table 1. Claim ladder for availability evidence.
Figure 1. Availability contract and paired three-clock audit. Panel A maps source and stipulated completion proxies to non-executable price anchors; transcript and model readiness remain unobserved. Panel B constructs three common-endpoint returns and their removed intervals. Panel C crosses four retrospective representations with three targets in 12 common-sample OLS fits. Panel D reports eight adjacent-clock coefficient contrasts. These contrasts are associational, ri390 is a separate duration check, and the timeline is not to scale. Four panels show the proxy timeline, return decomposition, common-sample OLS audit, and adjacent-clock coefficient contrasts. The representations are computed retrospectively, and the price anchors are labels rather than execution prices.
Figure 2. Target-clock sensitivity. (A) On 552 paired calls, S→A changes 9.4% of raw-return signs, 28.3% of fixed- A quintiles, and 30.1% of re-estimated relative quintiles. (B) A separate one-session perturbation of DEC before-market targets changes targets and four-stream MSE but not point rankings ( τ=1 ). (C) Exploratory LS and SA coefficient components; † marks the previously selected Qwen construct. Panel A compares sign and quintile changes for the legacy to source-start, source-start to completion-proxy, and total clock adjustments. Panel B shows a separate one-session perturbation of DEC before-market targets: grouped relative and fixed-cutpoint quintile reassignment bars at three, seven, and fifteen days, with MSE changes below. Panel C shows the exploratory coefficient components removed over the first and second clock transitions for four representations.
Stage
Calls
Retained from prior
Retained from parent
Parent event panel
2,094
100.0%
100.0%
Usable source clock
755
36.1%
36.1%
Audio-duration proxy
669
88.6%
31.9%
Complete common sample
552
82.5%
26.4%
Table 2. Complete-case sample construction. Percentages are relative to the previous and parent panels.
Metric
L→S
S→A
L→A
After-close
Calls
552
552
552
206
Spearman ρs
0.506
0.900
0.465
1.000
Mean ∣Δr∣ (pp)
3.427
0.623
3.520
0.000
Median ∣Δr∣ (pp)
2.661
0.179
2.587
0.000
Sign flips (%)
32.1
9.4
34.1
0.0
Relative moves (%)
64.3
30.1
68.5
6.3
Table 3. Distinct target-clock sensitivities. S→A reassigns raw-return targets; separately, perturbing DEC before-market targets changes losses under frozen-prediction rescoring but not point rankings.
Proxy-aligned three-clock target and association sensitivity.
Input boundary
Complete spoken Q&A.
Readiness (G,ℓ,M)
Reconstructed audio-duration proxy plus 15 minutes; 0–120 minutes is the sensitivity grid. Transcript and model-inference completion are unobserved.
Model clock
Retrospective checkpoints; Qwen inference ran in June 2026 with a 2025-vintage checkpoint.
Label start
L : previous close; S : close of the first bar starting after the documentary source-start proxy; A : the corresponding rule after the readiness proxy. These are label prices, not execution prices.
Endpoint
Following-session close; secondary endpoint after exactly 390 trading minutes.
Table 6. Availability Card for the earnings-call audit.