The first release of our 4.6+ series of the application is code complete but we are still working on the documentation.  If you in-fact would like to have a pre-documentation release of this version send me an email and I will be happy to arrange it.  Documentation completion is still a couple of weeks away as we are juggling some other production issues right now.  Check the previous two posts for the most significant enhancements to this release.  Frankly I am quite excited about the ability to limit searches to a DATE-CIK pair.  This was trickier than we had hoped as the memory object that we had to create to manage the processing was something we had never worked with before.

At the University of Nebraska at Omaha we have a fairly grand entrance with a ticker display set up across from a student run coffee/snack shop (Stedman’s Cafe).  I was in a conversation with our IT Director about a year ago and we wondered together what it would be like to display compensation data in real-time.  This was a low priority  project so it took awhile but we finally went live with it in November.  When our servers process executive compensation data from a company in a list we maintain of the 1,500 largest companies by market cap we push the data to a url where the ticker software that powers our tape can grab it for display.  Our display and the software is from Rise – I suspect most of you use the same system we use as they seem to have most of the market.

Here are a couple of shots of some compensation data as it is streaming across the display

When we decided to do this – I think I was intrigued by the challenge more than anything else.  However, I was sitting in the cafe the other day and it was interesting to hear students talk around me about the compensation.  While I doubt students talk about this every day – the brief time I was in there it was the subject of conversation with two student groups sitting relatively close.  Some seemed awed that people could make so much.  They were also speculating on the nature of the business and the specific nature of the jobs based on the titles.

We only display the Company Name, PERSON-NAME, PERSON-TITLE, SALARY and TOTAL for the current year.  However there are more fields available and I think after this proxy season is over we will play around with doing some changes in compensation and the like.

Here is an image of the JSON form of the data that gets pushed out for access:

Cabot Corp is chemicals and materials company.  According to their 10-K “(Our) principal products are rubber and specialty grade carbon blacks, specialty compounds, fumed metal oxides, activated carbons, inkjet colorants, and aerogel.”  (Yes I got lost after rubber).  They filed their proxy at 5:24 on Friday 1/24/2020 and this data was then available by 5:50 (not that speed is hyper critical here).

Enough rambling – we have done all of the hard work including working with Rise to sort out how to package the data for display.  If you would like to display this data on your ticker – let me know and we will add it to your license at NO ADDITIONAL CHARGE.  It is interesting how expensive some of the data is that is supplied for these terminals.  You can actually display any of the fields in the JSON above and we can also add fields (cash total versus non-cash total . . .).

I really was surprised that this was registering with students and so I am delighted to make this available to all of our clients.