As long as you're not using the target data for training then you're fine.

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Let me ask you then, why would you think this is cheating?

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The necessity of ML for your scenario has nothing to do with your question...

Yeah man... I really see no reason to use ML unless you have like a very good reason. Doesn't really seem like cheating though

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I normally wouldn't entertain that, but upon checking your profile it seems like you're interested in financial ML. As someone who's briefly done research in financial ML I can tell you that 99% of the papers you read and ML code you run are pretty much BS. You're better off using ML very sparingly and using if-else statements.

Data leakage is something different. But here I don’t see any reason why the ml model should work any better than the scientific formula.