31–40 of 55 posts
I expect most of the benefit to an expert would be in the comprehension of public documents into some standard, structured from, and not the cute (perhaps helpful to laymen) English presentation.
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.
Seriously, this is like "Bug tracking? You've got high priced professionals, why can't they just use Excel or sticky notes?"
An API for the raw data that underlies this system would be extremely useful to academics. Databases like compustat and execucomp are expensive and lack some of the most interesting details in SEC documents. I have worked on trying to extract deep information in footnotes in financial statements (e.g. foreign cash holdings and option exercise tax shields) and found even Turk/Crowdflower couldn't handle the complexity…
http://sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/ftpusers.htm
Parsing the edgar documents is a mixed bag. Many of the older filings and some of the more recent ones are in text rather than HTML. Finding footnotes in the HTML is probably not that bad but the issue is the lack of complete coverage where you miss the HTML footnote or the document is in text instead
I've worked on parsing the HTML tables for tables like Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, etc. It was problematic and I only got about 70% of the way there but I think a more complex rule base could get to 90%. The issue is that 90% isn't really good enough for many users.
I've heard that CapitalIQ/Thompson Reuters actually use Indian financial professionals to manually extract the info. This could be a good way to backfill/double check missing/bad values but I chose not to try that path. In the end, many of the potential customers will opt for paying a much higher price for a better brand and/or higher level processing like normalizing accounting standards.
An API for the raw data that underlies this system would be extremely useful to academics. Databases like compustat and execucomp are expensive and lack some of the most interesting details in SEC documents. I have worked on trying to extract deep information in footnotes in financial statements (e.g. foreign cash holdings and option exercise tax shields) and found even Turk/Crowdflower couldn't handle the complexity…
I was really excited that they'd figured out a way to cull balance sheet data out of the filings. Doesn't appear so though, "XYZ Corp filed their annual statement today, you can view it here "
Going forward, the SEC is requiring filers to make this process much easier
http://xbrl.sec.gov/ http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002.pdf
I like the idea, a lot. This seems to be well executed, but I wonder how much of a future this thing has with XBRL becoming a requirement. In 5 to 7 years there will be enough historical data tagged in XBRL for any analyst to perform as financial analysis.
Also, on the website I can search 400,000+ companies, but there only seems to be ~4900 filings on the dashboard. Doesn't add up to me.
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.
I often comb through filings for the super regional banks. The majority of my time is spent looking for a few key items and arranging the data into a useable format. If you are looking for more ideas on how this area could be improved, I'd be glad to fill out a survey or give you additional comments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
like other comments posted here, professional investors, on the other hand, generally already have another service they pay for, or proprietary data/information (for hedge funds or prop shops at least) that aggregates the specific data they are looking for.
not quite sure what the target audience of this is; if its investors with the intention of condensing data to just q/q and y/y operational performance, then the financial information technology space is already pretty crowded.
seems like a great product for a pain that most people have. i don't seen professional investment firms or bulge bracket banks would use this, however; at citi we use factset and capiq and even those services don't reveal everything and have errors sometimes. the analysts, at the end of the day, usually goes through the filings no matter what. like other comments posted here, professional investors, on the other hand…
EDIT: Hell, if I could assemble a team, I think the best way to attack this problem would be to build out the same functionality that Bloomberg provides for equities, provide it for free, and then build a retail brokerage firm around it. Give people the information to make investment decisions easily, and they will make those investment decisions. Just be there to capture the revenue generated by their trades.
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.
What other services could you get investors to pay for if they had all the information necessary to make thier own investment decisions in an easy to use format?