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Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

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Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#31

Post by throwup238 »

arrowleaf wrote: post #19
cobertos wrote: post #4

Dang, I saw the name and hoped it was a map-based app that showed you ownership of things around you (further intriguing me because I don't believe such data exists at a local scale anyway). Great project though! Opening up these sort of semi-encumbered datasets is what keeps humans well informed I'm from MI as well and always wondered about deeper datasets for watching money and influence change hands

There are a lot of GIS / mapping software that shows property ownership and their boundaries, useful for hunting. onX, for example, and I think you can purchase 'ownership layers' on stuff like Avenza. I agree with what you're saying though, it would be cool to take something like those property owner layers and find the ultimate legal entity for stuff like LLCs owning land. E, only semi-related: In the 'urban design…

> There are a lot of GIS / mapping software that shows property ownership and their boundaries, useful for hunting. onX, for example, and I think you can purchase 'ownership layers' on stuff like Avenza.

Gaia GPS [1] is the one I use. It's got a lot of layers for free including land ownership which properly shows all of my neighbors plots. I use it often when collecting rock specimens and mushrooms to make sure I'm on public land that allows it or to figure out who to seek permission from.

[1] https://www.gaiagps.com/

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#32

Post by anonyonoor »

sroussey wrote: post #28

Hi! This looks great. I am playing with SEC data at Embarc.com and found that ingesting the filings is no fun. Well, if it is xml, it is fine. But 8k filings are all HTML. Thankfully they have standard section names. Anyhow, are you downloading the sec filings locally and processing them? It can be a lot of files! The EDGAR database has a lot of files in there. I download stuff daily, add to sqlite, and then process…

For the search database, I did have to manually download each and every company, all 856,000 of them. To cut down on size though, I included all data points except for filings. This is because they're large, but also because they're updated often. By excluding them the database stays more up-to-date.

Other than the search database which needs to be available on demand, the rest of the filers are queried and analyzed on demand. This is required because some filers get really, really big. Blackrock Inc alone is about a 30MB file.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#33

Post by anonyonoor »

thecosas wrote: post #22

I think your site may be getting hugged to death right now. I have a feeling you'll learn a lot more about scalability after being on the front page of HN :-)

Wow, you really nailed it on the head.

I have been tearing my hair out for the last hour trying to get my Always Free Oracle instance running again.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#35

Post by anonyonoor »

Tijdreiziger wrote: post #21

504: GATEWAY_TIMEOUT Code: FUNCTION_INVOCATION_TIMEOUT If the data changes irregularly, you’re probably better off making it a static site and having a script update it periodically, also to avoid excessive cloud charges (since you seem to be hosting this on Vercel).

Vercel hosts the front-end, but the back-end is whats down right now. I thought I could rely on my Always Free Oracle cloud instance but I guess not.

The problem with making a static site is that there are over 800,000 SEC filers, so it would be impossible to query all of them and store it.

I hadn't expected so much traffic, so I really have no clue how to handle this without excessive cloud charges. The best I've done so far is to look into free hosting for open-source projeccts and add a donation link to the homepage.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#36

Post by multicast »

Very interesting project, I like the overview. I also really like that you took the finance industry as a theme for your project.

>> Every company in the United States

Sorry for being so fussy but I highly recommended changing the word 'company' / not using it in the future, as the title is quite misleading. No private company in the US has to register with the SEC or has to file with the SEC. 'Investment advisors', who also go by other aliases like 'asset manager', have to file a 13F filing only if they a) are registered with the SEC due to fund marketing purposes and b) if they have, as you already mentioned, over $100 million dollars under management (not 'in holdings'). This is also why large family offices (.e.g. Bayshore Global Management of Sergey Brin) won't show up in any SEC records as they meet the second but not the first criteria - same goes pretty much for any non asset-management company (e.g. McDonald's) as they do not raise money for fund vehicles. However, you have take this into account on your website, and further below you wrote "money manager" which is correct in finance jargon.

I hope this gives you a better understanding, keep up the great work.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#37

Post by anonyonoor »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #5

Whalewisdom and gurufocus have similar offerings. Not sure if they are 100% free.

Both offer premium memberships, and can often be really restricting when viewing/downloading data.

The main feature I added because of WhaleWisdom was the data download. For any filer you can download all data in CSV or JSON, as on WhaleWisdom that's unavailable. I also plan to add a bunch of features those sites have eventually.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#38

Post by anonyonoor »

multicast wrote: post #36

Very interesting project, I like the overview. I also really like that you took the finance industry as a theme for your project. >> Every company in the United States Sorry for being so fussy but I highly recommended changing the word 'company' / not using it in the future, as the title is quite misleading. No private company in the US has to register with the SEC or has to file with the SEC. 'Investment advisors',…

I geniunely did not know that there was a real difference between companies and asset managers. Sorry for the confusion.

Thanks for informing me, and for the kind words, I'll make sure to avoid using the word company from now on.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#39

Post by anonyonoor »

neom wrote: post #23

So you're 17. It's a pretty unique niche for a young person, so I'd be interested to know where your curiosity in this comes from, and even more so, why you decided to share the output of your curiosity? What got you interested? Where do you see it going? Are other people around you at your stage in life also interested in this stuff? imo you're on a great path, stick with it!

My cousin told me about 13F filers about a year and a half ago, and I was shocked to find out that all SEC data is public. After I saw that a lot of sites restrict data for SEC filings, I set out to find the SEC filings directly and make them more accessible.

This project was a way to use my web development experience for a good cause, and to learn a lot along the way. I hope to improve the project thouroughly though user suggestion, then maybe hand it off to other people. Like I said in my post, my main goal is to one day get into start-ups, so I can create good in the world through them. This is hopefully the first step in that journey.

Thanks for your kind words.

Re: Show HN: Wallstreetlocal – View investments from America's biggest companies

#40

Post by sroussey »

anonyonoor wrote: post #32
sroussey wrote: post #28

Hi! This looks great. I am playing with SEC data at Embarc.com and found that ingesting the filings is no fun. Well, if it is xml, it is fine. But 8k filings are all HTML. Thankfully they have standard section names. Anyhow, are you downloading the sec filings locally and processing them? It can be a lot of files! The EDGAR database has a lot of files in there. I download stuff daily, add to sqlite, and then process…

For the search database, I did have to manually download each and every company, all 856,000 of them. To cut down on size though, I included all data points except for filings. This is because they're large, but also because they're updated often. By excluding them the database stays more up-to-date. Other than the search database which needs to be available on demand, the rest of the filers are queried and analyzed…

I get the list of filings, and for now only download the ones I want, which are related to S-1 or 8k (there are lot that are related, including withdrawals of a filing, updates to a filing, etc., and some companies use an S-4 etc).

Right now I scan the list of daily filings, and for every cik I mark them as dirty. Another pass looks at ciks marked dirty, and downloads the xml or json of the filings. I then scan for anything new, create filing rows and mark them as dirty so to speak.

Annual reports can be big, and for my purposes I don't need them so I skip them. The HTML of these things is garbage! But a lot of financial data is in the company facts which is nice and clean.

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