I was curious about the usefulness of the Edgar Database:

  • Is is possible to predict the development of the stock price using the company filings?
  • Can we predict the total yearly profits for the current year based on the filings of the current months?
  • Is the overall profitability changing over time: e.g. are companies more profitable because of e.g. Trump?
  • Which sectors are making money and which are loosing ?
  • Is there a relationship between profits and losses?
  • What are the most profitable countries which file in the US?
  • How good is the quality of the data?
  • What are the most profitable states?

It is impressive that the US government makes this data available free to use. However the data format and the quantity of information makes it very difficult and the SEC completely fails in providing any reporting functionality which could give some useful insights.

http://rankandfiled.com/#/ has some cool overviews but to get an easy access to the content of the quarterly and annual filings we still have to rely on commercial solutions.

To overcome this obstacle I have made my own free Java Library “Smart Edgar” which makes the hard things a little bit easier.

it provides the following functionality:

  • Download of XBRL Edgar Filings
  • Parsing of Filings
  • Loading of Filings into a SQL Database
  • A simple but powerful Java API for querying data
  • A REST service

In order to simplify the task:

  • I am only loading numeric parameters into the database. So all e.g. html input is skipped
  • I am updating the database only once per hour with new filings. So there is a delay!
  • For the time being I am only loading yearly filings. I might decide to load quarterly filings in the future as well

Now that I have the data and the toolbox, I am ready to answer the questions above.

So stay tuned….


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