The general topic area is the acquisition and analysis of public corporate data filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). We want to know if we can search unstructured filing data for information regarding corporate material condition or corporate compliance with federal and state laws. This information can be used by the public, regulators and financial companies to better monitor the public corporations that they have an interest in.
One of the key parts of this will be the software reading the narratives and footnotes of corporate filings. The software will be looking for significant information in the filings, such as off balance sheet entities that public corporations have relationships with. Today this kind of information is realized by human analysts that can only track a few companies at a time, often after significant events have already happened. Enron is a good example of this. We want to build software that will do this kind of analysis on the 10,000+ companies that file with the SEC and update that body of knowledge on a daily basis.
Presently, search-sec.com acts as a catalog of SEC filings linking to all SEC filings file since 1995. Insidernewswire.com contains all insider trading data going back to May 2005. We want to build on that and start developing software agents that will aggregate data from multiple filings for a company, an industry a geographic region or other ways that we haven't even thought of.