Label the retired prices/metadata domains, and make the scheduling doc match the box

[mspinola]

Why

A consumer read newest_data.prices from a store whose bars moved to marketdata at ADR-0007, got 2026-08-07 with lagging: 0, and had no signal it was reading an abandoned tree. The bar store was current the whole time and its replica was current too — the only thing wrong was which directory the reader was pointed at.

The silence was structural, not a one-off. Lag is measured within a domain (each entry against its own domain's newest write), so a uniformly frozen tree is perfectly self-consistent, scores lagging: 0, and sits in the report beside genuinely-current COT domains looking exactly as healthy. store.py already documented prices and metadata as having no writer left; only the status report had never been told.

What --check says now

domain             entries         rows   newest data      last write (UTC)  behind
prices                  98      954,524    2026-08-07  2026-08-08T15:40:20Z     14d  ← RETIRED
metadata                 1           49          None  2026-08-09T13:47:50Z       —  ← RETIRED
cot_legacy              53       81,821    2026-08-11  2026-08-21T12:10:42Z     10d
...

⚠ prices, metadata: RETIRED — this store still holds the files, but cotdata stopped writing
                    them at ADR-0007. Their dates are frozen and will never advance again.
  Daily bars and contract specs now live in the marketdata store ($MARKETDATA_STORE);
  read them with `marketdata-update --check`.

✓ every entry in the live domains was written by the latest producer pass.

Real output against the production store, not a mock-up.

Design notes

• Retired domains stay visible rather than being dropped from _DOMAINS. A pre-move store still holds the files; hiding them would make --check disagree with the operator's own disk. The goal is to stop them reading as healthy, not to stop them being seen.
• The all-clear is now scoped — "every entry in the live domains". Unqualified, it was vouching for the dead tree too.
• retired is carried into status.json, and the build_status_doc contract docstring no longer uses prices as its worked example of what to poll. Neither does the README's polling contract, which is where the advice that caused this actually came from.
• SYNCING.md explains why /XD prices is the wrong fix. Excluded directories are neither copied nor deleted, so an exclusion freezes the stale copy on every replica permanently instead of clearing it. Delete on the producer and let /MIR propagate.

Scheduling doc corrections

Independent of the above, the doc had drifted from the box it describes:

• It called the bars task "marketdata bars" in six pasteable commands. The task is named cotdata prices — created before ADR-0007, never renamed because renaming loses the run history. Every one of those commands targeted a task that does not exist.
• The equities producer had no documentation anywhere: the task count read "three tasks (plus an optional fourth)" against five real tasks, and the wrapper it runs existed only as a gitignored local file. Adds docs/examples/windows/run-equities.cmd and the schtasks line, with the reasoning for why it is a separate task rather than a step in run-prices.cmd.

Tests

The fixture's lagging exemplar lived in prices, which is now deliberately silent, so it moves to a live domain — the mechanic those tests are named for still gets exercised. Five new tests cover the retired flag, the suppression, the report text, the status.json contract, and a guard that live domains still report lag.

222 passed. The 3 failures in test_sync_preflight.py / test_vintage_ingest.py are pre-existing and unchanged — verified against main.

Also

Widened the domain column: cot_supplemental is 16 chars and was overflowing a 12-wide field, shunting the rest of that row right. Visible in the output above.

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