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While I've been exploring Linux the last few months, I'd like to actually start putting it to use. The operating system might not make any difference at all, but I'm wondering how difficult it would be to write scripts or use programs to mine financial data and spit out a useful result or report. Since most public company data is, well, public, couldn't some type of program be written to pull up data beyond what you can find on Google or Yahoo Finance? I'm looking mostly at EDGAR (the SEC system that contains a private companies filings) and how it can be mined. Is there something that exists that does this already that isn't some expensive subscription service? A script or web scraper that can pull out keywords and line items from an SEC filing and make it available for use quickly is what I'm imagining. Does any of this make sense? Does it already exist and I don't know about it?
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Jun 28, 2014 03:26
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Hummer Driving human being posted:putting it to use I never heard of EDGAR until now, that's cool. At first glance it looks like getting the info is going to be the easy part - they have a well organized and indexed ftp access, there must be a million ways you could get it. The hard part is going to be doing something with it. What do you want to do with it?
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Jun 28, 2014 04:44
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Hummer Driving human being posted:While I've been exploring Linux the last few months, I'd like to actually start putting it to use. The operating system might not make any difference at all, but I'm wondering how difficult it would be to write scripts or use programs to mine financial data and spit out a useful result or report. Since most public company data is, well, public, couldn't some type of program be written to pull up data beyond what you can find on Google or Yahoo Finance? If you're somehow able to get a private company's financial information from EDGAR call up Bill Gates and tell him he's back out of the number one richest spot, because you, Hummer Driving human being, will be the new number one.
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Jun 28, 2014 04:46
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Bloody Queef posted:If you're somehow able to get a private company's financial information from EDGAR call up Bill Gates and tell him he's back out of the number one richest spot, because you, Hummer Driving human being, will be the new number one. I'm not asking how to get private companies' data. I'm asking if writing scripts would save time or if there's a free service out there that does the same thing. This idea was prompted by a friend of mine who's an analyst for a hedge fund in New York. I asked him what he does all day and it sounded like he spent a lot of his time looking up information on financial documents posted on EDWARD. The first thing I thought to myself was "couldn't a program do that for you much faster than actually going to the EDGAR website, opening up the file manually, and looking for the numbers?" This would be for fundamental analysis as a time saver to find keywords and ratios in SEC documents.
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Jun 28, 2014 14:36
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Hummer Driving human being posted:I'm not asking how to get private companies' data. I'm asking if writing scripts would save time or if there's a free service out there that does the same thing. I was being a pedantic douche. EDGAR has public company disclosures. You asked about private companies in the op.
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Jun 28, 2014 17:43
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I mean, we have sites like Hoovers and a whole bunch of other services pulling together these reports from EDGAR already. Aren't they in XBRL format as well already? What would be the point of your script? Just to compile the information again? or do you mean trying to eliminate the role of Analysts that put out Analyst reports on public company stock? I'm sure a human analyst is able to put out a more reliable analyst report and a better recommendation.Hummer Driving human being posted:I'm looking mostly at EDGAR (the SEC system that contains a Ftfy Bloody Queef posted:If you're somehow able to get a private company's financial information from EDGAR call up Bill Gates and tell him he's back out of the number one richest spot, because you, Hummer Driving human being, will be the new number one.
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Jun 28, 2014 21:51
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Bloody Queef posted:I was being a pedantic douche. EDGAR has public company disclosures. You asked about private companies in the op. That was my mistake. I meant public in the EDGAR parenthesis. fuseshock, I hadn't heard of Hoovers. I did a quick check of them and saw that they sell their reports. I picked apple as an example and they charge $69 for the report. No, not eliminate the analysts necessarily, but allow an analyst to review more companies given a period of time that he or she would be able to just browsing EDGAR. Something that did the legwork of downloading the financial statements and comparing them against others. A way to quickly filter similar companies or similar sectors with as little typing and manual searching as possible. A way to look for keywords within thos financial statements as well without having to open them up. Maybe I'm just describing this really poorly.
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Jun 29, 2014 01:45
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Well, there seem to be quite a few services out there that pull, compile, and display data from EDGAR. Most are paid services, of course, but here's one free one as an example of what can be done: http://rankandfiled.com/ It would certainly be possible to roll your own EDGAR application, though the complexity would depend on what you wanted to do with it. Simply getting raw data from EDGAR is pretty easy; the tricky part would be figuring out exactly how you want to filter, use, and/or present it and then working out the necessary queries and algorithms to fetch and process the data accordingly. As for your analyst buddy's job, if he's just pulling filings for a specific company from EDGAR to examine their data in detail, that really doesn't involve much manual work (basically it's search for company ticker or CIK and click the desired document). If he's manually searching EDGAR to find and compare financials on a bunch of different companies or trying to look at all companies in field X or something, then yeah, a script or application would speed things up a lot.
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Jun 29, 2014 02:48
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People pull filings from Edgar to read what is in the footnotes, not to compare income statements between companies. I'm just surprised your hedge fund friend isn't working with bloomberg or something similar, it really doesn't make any sense.
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Jul 3, 2014 05:48
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mike- posted:People pull filings from Edgar to read what is in the footnotes, not to compare income statements between companies. I'd find someone at another company or ask in I RUN A HEDGE FUND thread. One person needing something is an intrigue; three is a niche.
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Jul 3, 2014 21:31
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mike- posted:People pull filings from Edgar to read what is in the footnotes, not to compare income statements between companies. He does have bloomberg with him. I've never used it so I don't know what it's capable of.
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Jul 6, 2014 05:13
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