Edgar for Humans: Where individual effort trumps mighty organizations

Last week, Maris Jensen released her web site SEC Filings for Humans. (There is a nice interview with Maris Jensen at E Pluribus Unum.)

I use the SEC’s Edgar database quite often, but nowadays I never go there without first having identified the exact document that I need through other means. Searching for the document itself on Edgar is not for the faint hearted. I use Yahoo Finance and Google Finance quite extensively and find both quite disappointing. It is therefore truly amazing that one individual using a bunch of open source software (particularly D3.js and SQLAlchemy) can do something that none of these powerful organizations with vast resources have been able to accomplish.

For example, on Edgar, if you look for JPMorgan, you will find two registrants with the same name Jpmorgan Chase & Co. Only by trial and error would you be able to figure out which is the true JPMorgan. At Maris’ site, both registrants are listed, but the correct one is identified by the ticker symbol (JPM). Not rocket science, but saves a few minutes of searching for the wrong documents. Once you select JPM, you can view all its financial information (from the XBRL filings) in tabular form instead of wading through a huge text file. A lot of interesting information is displayed visually – for example, you can find a time series chart of all of the company’s subsidiaries. (For a company like JPM with hundreds of subsidiaries, this chart is quite intimidating, a similar chart for say Apple is more enjoyable). The influence chart of cross ownership is also truly impressive.

It is quite likely that in a few days as more and more users try out her website, it will become unresponsive and possibly even crash. One hopes that a large organization with more bandwidth and hardware takes over the site and keeps it running. But the prospects do not look very good – Maris tried to donate the whole thing to the SEC, but they did not even bother to respond. Meanwhile the SEC spends a lot of money buying back its own Edgar data from commercial vendors.

Finally, will something like this ever become available in India?

Posted at 5:39 pm IST on Tue, 25 Feb 2014         permanent link

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