# the cent

On the fifteenth of March, 2005, the day closed at 1.462857.

The alert, priced with a cent, sat at 1.47.
The close never reached it.
MISFIRE.

The alert, priced with the tick, where the price had traded, sat at 1.4571428571.
The close cleared it.
QUALIFIED.

Same day. Same bar. Same rule, almost.

Since that afternoon the stock has split seven for one, then four for one,
so the history is divided by twenty-eight,
and the cent, laid on the adjusted price, was not a cent.
Where the stock had traded, at 40.96, it was twenty-eight cents.

The twenty-first of June, 2011, again:
close 11.617857, cent 11.62, tick 11.6132142857.
Again the cent stood just above the close,
and a trade the product would have taken was written off as a miss.

Two entries, wrong for years,
by an amount too small to see on the chart
and exactly the size of the habit.

Nobody hid them.
A check found the cents, a second reader found these two,
a person ruled,
and the check now blocks.

---

*reach-iv · 2026-10-11 · every number here is read from `provenance/rooms/AAPL/layers/1.0.2` and `1.0.3` (`derived/historical.json`, daily) and `staged/STAGED.json` (the splits), not typed from memory.*