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An open API for company SEC filings

by pranade on 4/27/15, 6:18 PM with 13 comments

• by Animats on 4/28/15, 12:29 AM

  There's no need for a third party "open API" for SEC filings. The SEC already has one.[1] You can also download all SEC filings via FTP.

  We've been indexing all SEC filings since 2000, from before the SEC had a public search engine. You can access them at "www.downside.com". While the site hasn't been updated in years, the indexing engine continues to run every day at 4AM, downloading the new SEC filing index for the day. Costs me $15 a month to keep it running.

  There's a paid commercial service, "edgar-online.com", which also does this. They've been unnecessary since the SEC put up a search engine.

  [1] http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/webusers.htm

• by apendleton on 4/28/15, 4:17 AM

  "The information provided herein may be displayed and printed for your internal use only and may not reproduced, retransmitted, distributed, disseminated, sold, published, broadcast or circulated." That's a curious definition of "open."

• by csandstedt on 4/28/15, 1:19 PM

  This is a good idea but as others have highlighted the issue will be with data quality. At TagniFi we've been pretty vocal about the quality of the XBRL data because we find a lot of errors. Using the XBRL data directly from the SEC is the equivalent of drinking pond water since there is very little validation occurring[1]. This has resulted in a significant number of errors that will need to be corrected before consuming the data. We've automated some of this error correction but there are still quite a few that need human involvement. We also run all of the data through hundreds of QA checks to ensure data quality in the absence of validation.

  [1] http://www.tagnifi.com/dont-drink-the-pond-water/

• by wrd on 4/28/15, 5:47 AM

  I've lately spent a lot of time trudging through 10-K's and financial data, so this is really cool! I've almost made this exact service myself on a number of occasions but stopped due to the unreliability of XBRL, which meant that even if I had a sweet API I'd still have to go back and double-check the numbers by hand.

  For me, Excel integration with products like CapIQ is good enough -- for now.

• by hbcondo714 on 4/28/15, 7:14 AM

  Glad to see this got some good upvotes and discussion as some investors aren't even aware of the wealth of information SEC filings contain. Having worked with the SEC's archaic Edgar "database" with another provider of free SEC Filings and API[1], I respect what Kimonolabs is doing.

  [1] https://www.Last10K.com

• by cymetica on 4/28/15, 4:59 PM

  We use the SEC Edgar API/XBRL/FTP datasets with a good amount of success over at http://cymetica.com

  This may seem counter-intuitive, but we are glad to see more advancement is being made in this area which results in greater opportunity for information arbitrage.