What does it mean on a 10-K balance sheet when a field is blank for a single year?

Question

I am looking at a corporate balance sheet in a 10-K for Chipotle and the line for Long term investments is $125b for 2016, but blank for 2017.

What does it mean when a company doesn't list this info for a single year? That it doesn't exist, or it is unknown?

Answer 1

To be pedantic, it's not "blank", is it a hyphen (-), which it typical accounting notation for zero.

So it means that they had sold (or written off) all of their long term investments in 2017.