A registration statement is a legal instrument, and legal instruments are expected to agree with themselves. The 2005 Form N-1A of The Wall Street Fund, Inc. is therefore instructive precisely where it diverges. In three separate places it dates the fund's beginning to December 1945, and in each place the day differs. The exhibit index lists Articles of Incorporation dated December 21. A footnote beneath the performance table states that the fund "was launched on December 23, 1945". The statement of additional information records that the fund "was organized as a Maryland corporation on December 26, 1945". A fourth date arrives from outside the filing: the website of the successor fund gives an inception date of December 24, 1945.
The temptation is to select one date and suppress the rest. The archival discipline runs the other way. Each date was produced by a different part of the corporate apparatus for a different purpose, and the pattern of their disagreement is itself a historical fact about how an investment company constructs and transmits its own origin.
The corporate act and its instruments
Consider first the December 21 and December 26 dates. Maryland corporate formation in the 1940s proceeded through the execution of articles by incorporators, followed by acceptance and recording by the State Department of Assessments and Taxation. A charter dated on the day of signature and recorded several days later is the ordinary shape of such a process, and the two Articles of Amendment listed in the same exhibit index — March 19, 1946 and September 29, 1969 — are described precisely as filed with that Department. The five-day gap between December 21 and December 26 therefore reads as the interval between execution and state acceptance. The statement of additional information, whose function is to describe the legal shell of the enterprise, naturally reaches for the date on which the shell acquired legal existence: December 26.
The launch and the performance table
The December 23 date sits in a different register. It appears as footnote (1) to the table of average annual total returns, a location whose purpose is to define the earliest period over which performance can be measured. Performance disclosure under Form N-1A begins from the commencement of operations, and "launched" is the vernacular for that commencement. It is entirely coherent for a fund to have begun offering or investing on December 23 under articles signed on December 21, ahead of the state's formal acceptance on December 26; small enterprises in the 1940s frequently operated in the brief interval between execution and recording. The performance footnote, then, encodes an operational memory rather than a corporate one.
The 2005 filing is a 485APOS — a post-effective amendment filed for delayed effectiveness — and its performance table was left blank pending completion, so the footnote survives as a fragment of disclosure architecture rather than as a fully populated record. That fragility is worth noting. The launch date survived in the template; the returns themselves awaited a later draft.
The successor's date
December 24 comes from a website maintained by the current adviser to the successor fund, Evercore Equity Fund, which describes itself as previously known as the Wall Street Fund and gives "12/24/45" as inception. The successor adopted the predecessor's performance and financial history upon the 2014 reorganization, and with that history came the obligation to state an inception date for performance purposes. The successor's date falls between the launch date and the organization date in the predecessor's own filing. Whether it derives from a shareholder record, a first-NAV computation, a transfer-agent ledger, or a rounding convention in a data vendor's feed is an open question the supplied record leaves open.
What the pattern teaches
Four dates, four institutional voices. The exhibit index speaks for the lawyers who assembled the charter file. The SAI speaks for the corporate secretary describing the legal person. The performance footnote speaks for fund accounting and the disclosure template. The successor's website speaks for a marketing and data function operating seventy years later under a different name and adviser. Each voice is accurate within its own frame of reference, and the archive's task is to preserve the frames.
This matters beyond antiquarian precision. Continuity claims — "since 1945," "founded in 1945" — are commercial assets in the fund industry, and their persuasive force depends on a single, clean date. The record of The Wall Street Fund, Inc. shows that even a fund with a continuous adviser from 1954 onward and an unbroken regulatory identity under File No. 811-00515 carried a plural memory of its own birth. The plurality is a feature of institutional life, and any history that flattens it into a single anniversary trades evidence for convenience.
The archive therefore presents all four dates on its timeline, each tagged with the type of event its source supports: a corporate act for the articles and the organization, a reported date for the launch and for the successor's inception. The founding of The Wall Street Fund, Inc. occupied a week in late December 1945. That week, rather than any single day within it, is what the primary record establishes.