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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Using a computer to work for you.
 
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Bloody Queef
Mar 23, 2012

by zen death robot

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?

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?

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.

* # ¿ Jun 28, 2014 04:46
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Bloody Queef
Mar 23, 2012

by zen death robot

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.

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.

I was being a pedantic douche. EDGAR has public company disclosures. You asked about private companies in the op.

* # ¿ Jun 28, 2014 17:43
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The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Ask/Tell > Business, Finance, and Careers > Using a computer to work for you.