A delayed quote tells you a price as of some past moment; it never tells you what a company has actually announced. When a headline about an earnings miss or a restructuring crosses your screen and the numbers look inconsistent with the ticker, the reliable move is to go back to the filing itself. That works in both markets this article covers, and neither step requires paid data or insider access.
On the SSE website, the stock code is your search key
Chinese listed companies file their announcements through the Shanghai Stock Exchange's "information disclosure one-stop" service. Companies prepare announcements in the formats the exchange specifies, using standardized filing software (a Word/WPS plugin or a standalone client), and the resulting documents are published in the disclosure section of the SSE website for investors to read [1].
Two features of that archive make verification practical. First, announcement PDFs are stored under a fixed URL structure built from the securities code and the disclosure date; two 2026 examples are a STAR Market restructuring report filed under code 688622 on 2026-09-12 and another under 688531 on 2026-06-26 [2][5]. Second, every announcement opens with a standardized header: securities code, short name, and listing venue, as in "证券代码：688531 证券简称：日联科技 上市地点：上海证券交易所" [5]. So if a push notification or a media summary claims a company made an announcement, you can locate the original by code, and the header confirms you are reading the right issuer's document rather than a misattributed one.
Knowing the disclosure calendar tells you what should already exist
Retrieving the original is half the job; the other half is judging whether a piece of information is due yet. CSRC investor-education material explains where periodic reports live and when they must appear: full annual and interim reports are available on the exchange website (sse.com.cn is given as the example) and on the websites of CSRC-designated newspapers such as China Securities Journal, Shanghai Securities News, Securities Daily and Securities Times; the annual report must be completed within four months of the fiscal year end (by April 30) and the interim report within two months of the half-year end (by August 31), with the exact disclosure date self-booked by the company and generally unchanged [6].
Earnings preannouncements follow their own triggers and clock. Under the SSE service page, a company must preannounce annual results when net profit is negative, when it swings from loss to profit, when profit rises or falls 50% or more year on year (exempt if the prior-year annual or half-year EPS is at or below 0.05 yuan or 0.03 yuan), when operating revenue after deducting unrelated and non-commercial income falls below 300 million yuan while profit metrics are negative, or when period-end net assets are negative; the annual preannouncement is due within one month after the fiscal year ends, and the half-year version within 15 days after the half year [1].
Put together, this gives you a testable timeline. If a report claims a company "just admitted" a large profit swing, you can check whether the corresponding preannouncement window has even opened, and whether the document actually sits in the SSE disclosure archive. A number that exists in headlines but not in the official filing, past its statutory deadline, is best treated as rumor.
Check that the rule text you quote is still in force
The calendar above is only as good as the rule version behind it, and Chinese exchanges revise their listing rules frequently. The SSE website maintains a dedicated section of repealed rule texts, marking obsolete documents with labels such as 【失效】 (invalid) and 【已被修正】 (amended); the April 2024 revisions of the Main Board and STAR Market listing rules both appear there as invalid [4].
This matters because figures circulating in older articles or screenshots may reflect superseded thresholds and deadlines. Quarterly report requirements, for instance, have been adjusted in past rule revisions, so a guide telling you to expect a mandatory quarterly report under the old regime may not match what a specific company must file today. When you verify, confirm the rule text you are consulting is the current effective version, not a repealed one [4].
The US parallel: EDGAR restatements can overturn what you already "knew"
The same principle holds for US-listed companies, with one addition: official filings include amendments, and amendments sometimes reverse the numbers everyone has been quoting.
American Realty Capital Properties filed a Form 10-K/A on EDGAR in 2015 restating its fiscal 2013 and 2012 financials. The 2013 Adjusted Funds From Operations figure was restated from $236,374 thousand to $192,416 thousand, a reduction of 18.60% [3]. The filing also records that on October 29, 2014 the company had disclosed in a Form 8-K that its audit committee concluded the previously issued audited financial statements, the unaudited quarterly financials for the periods ended March 31 and June 30, 2014, and the company's earnings releases for those periods "should no longer be relied upon" [3].
The lesson cuts both ways. A reader relying only on quote screens and media coverage could keep using an AFFO number that the company had formally repudiated months earlier. A reader who checks the 8-K and then the 10-K/A on EDGAR sees, from the company's own words, that the old figures are dead and what the corrected figures are. Nothing in this example describes the EDGAR search interface step by step, but it demonstrates the payoff: the amended filing, not the last headline, is the authoritative record.
What this method can and cannot settle
Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, this article does not explain the technical rules behind delayed market data itself, such as distribution tiers; the evidence here covers disclosure archives and reporting deadlines, not quote-feed engineering. Second, the US portion rests on an archival example rather than documented search procedures, so treat it as a demonstration of why EDGAR amendments matter. Third, the deadlines and thresholds cited above come from CSRC investor-education material and the SSE service page [6][1][3]; because SSE rules have been revised over time, the current rule text on the exchange website is the final arbiter, and the repealed-texts section is the tool for spotting superseded versions [4].
The conclusion follows from the mechanism, not from any market call. When a quote lags or a headline conflicts with the tape, the company's own filing is the ground truth: locate it by stock code in the SSE disclosure archive, use the statutory windows to judge timeliness, verify the rule version you are applying, and for US names read the EDGAR filing including any amendments. This is a verification habit, not investment advice; nothing here recommends buying or selling any security.