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MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

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Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#21

Post by danteembermage »

athst wrote: post #6
donw wrote: post #2

If they had an API, or a machine-readable format that contained only the data from each SEC filing, I would be very interested.

the SEC already makes filing data available in machine readable format - it's called XBRL. I don't think all companies are on it now, but there's a mandate that will force all companies to eventually do it

Not back to 1996 they don't (the first year of online SEC filings) which for those of us interested in doing panel studies we'd love to have. You can purchase it for ~$20,000 for a small institution, I'm not sure what an individual license would run.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#23

Post by rorrr »

Lambent_Cactus wrote: post #17
rorrr wrote: post #5

So who is the target audience? Finance pros can already read SEC filings. SEO is the only obvious source of traffic and money I can think of.

Lawyers? Retail investors? Even for finance pros who currently parse the raw filings, I can see how having an auto-generated human-readable summary that pulled out the key points would save enough time to be worth spending money on.

So here are the two versions:

http://marketbrief.com/goog/10q/quarterly-report/2011/5/10/7...

http://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/00011931251113442...

They look pretty identical to me. Plus sec.gov has the June 30th report that MarketBrief simply doesn't have.

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/0001193125111...

Look: http://marketbrief.com/goog/financials

The last one is from May 10th.

And this is Google we're talking about, a major player. Imagine what kind of things they may have missing for smaller companies.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#24

Post by dirtae »

I have been using SECWatch for awhile, and noticed that the email notifications I've been getting have been pointing to MarketBrief for the last few weeks. Didn't realize it was a YC company until now.

This is a product I have a personal need for, but I have to say that I'm disappointed with MarketBrief so far. The auto-generated "human readable" articles don't seem to provide much value. In fact, when I started to see them, I assumed it was some kind of SEO strategy, not something that was actually intended to be useful to me. I mean, why would I want to see a bunch of numbers embedded in long-form prose template instead of a more easily digestible table?

Even more seriously, a lot of the SEC filings on MarketBrief don't seem complete. For example, I received an email notification today about this SEC filing:

http://marketbrief.com/pmic/8k/events-or-changes-between-qua...

The filing basically says that the company issued a press release, which is supposed to be attached. But the attached press release is nowhere to be found. If I go to the main SEC EDGAR website, the press release is easily accessible:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1453820/0000950123110...

I'm excited about the problem being tackled here, so I'll look forward to future improvements.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#25

Post by jessedhillon »

michaeldhopkins wrote: post #16
suking wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't answer the question. Any hedge fund or large trading desk will have prop tools that are probably 100X better as they have unlimited $ to go after more data. Is the hobbyist going to be subscribing... doubtful. Cool idea, but small market imo.

I should have been more clear that finance pros do not all already read SEC filings. Some pay for news services this could replace. Some read the filings manually and would pay a small amount of money to not bother with edgar. They won't get the unlimited-budget firms but they could get a branch manager to replace a $3k/year newsletter with this.

Hey Michael, would you contact me please, I'd like to chat with you more about this idea. My email is in my profile. Thanks

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#26

Post by Gaussian »

There's a ton of places that this can go. Just building on top of the functionality they've already enabled, this could become quite powerful very quickly.

Here's this raw data stream that's existed for years that hasn't seen any good tandems of algorithms+UI applied toward it. Big opportunity.

Watch Bloomberg, Reuters and Yahoo...they could be jousting for this in six months or less.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#27

Post by robertk »

mshafrir wrote: post #10
athst wrote: post #7

I'd be interested to know how Google feels about automatically generating content from other content like this - at first glance it looks like a regular article, but after you read a few it's clear that they have some sort of dynamic template for the content. More legit than a content farm I suppose, but it's not necessarily high quality either.

Thanks for checking out MarketBrief. We just launched our financial news service, but we're constantly iterating on the quality and analysis of our articles, and our sights are set much higher than simply churning content.

Ironically, when I started reading this I thought you were poking fun at the generated language, because your post sounded like it to me.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#28

Post by dereg »

Gaussian wrote: post #26

There's a ton of places that this can go. Just building on top of the functionality they've already enabled, this could become quite powerful very quickly. Here's this raw data stream that's existed for years that hasn't seen any good tandems of algorithms+UI applied toward it. Big opportunity. Watch Bloomberg, Reuters and Yahoo...they could be jousting for this in six months or less.

Bloomberg and Reuters already have competing services that cost tens of thousands of dollars each year for a subscription. If they bought this, it'd be to eliminate a competitor.

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#29

Post by sigil »

A few years back I wrote a scraper for 13f and 13g filings. There was no standard format requirement at the time (is there now?) so it was an 80/20 hack with the remaining 20% completed via Mechanical Turk. Not sure what became of the project, but it seemed like there was a menupages-style opportunity to monetize the cleaned up data. Glad someone actually went ahead and did it!

To the MarketBrief guys: are you using anything cool (machine learning?) to clean up historical data?

Re: MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly

#30

Post by michaeldhopkins »

jessedhillon wrote: post #25
michaeldhopkins wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I should have been more clear that finance pros do not all already read SEC filings. Some pay for news services this could replace. Some read the filings manually and would pay a small amount of money to not bother with edgar. They won't get the unlimited-budget firms but they could get a branch manager to replace a $3k/year newsletter with this.

Hey Michael, would you contact me please, I'd like to chat with you more about this idea. My email is in my profile. Thanks

Sent.
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