I am making available a new database on the platform that has three fields; BASE_CUSIP, CUSIP and CIK. As you have probably seen, we have parsed the 13F filings and have been trying to link the CUSIP to the issuer CIK. CUSIPs are hard to get as they are issued by the American Banker’s Association and managed by Standard and Poor’s. What we did to identify the mapping between CUSIPs and CIKs is we parsed the SC 13G and SC 13D filings as they contain CUSIP values.
Based on the metadata associated with this filing we could determine that this related to the company that was named BioScrip, whose CIK is 1014739. Because of the number of SC 13 filings that were made with this CIK we feel pretty comfortable that this mapping is correct.
Of course it is never that easy as you well know. Bioscrip was acquired in a reverse merger type arrangement in 2019 and while the legal entity with respect to filing with the SEC remained fixed, the shares were replaced with new shares and with those new shares a new CUSIP was issued (68404L201) as can be seen in the image from an SC 13 filing made in 2022.
Since our interest is in making it easier for you to search for SEC filing content, we believe this mapping will help you when you want to identify filings made by some security issuer when you have the CUSIP and not the CIK. From our perspective, the fact that the CUSIP changes is more or less irrelevant. If you have data that is indexed on CUSIP for this company that relates to security information prior to August 2019 you will have the CUSIP value 09069N108 – that maps to CIK 1014739. If your data is more recent (in 2020 for example) you would have CUSIP 6804L201 – that maps to CIK 1014739. And actually, if you have data prior to early 2005 you might have CUSIP 553044108 (the company was known as MIM CORP then). So we have one CIK that maps to three CUSIPS. We are pretty confident that we have enough evidence to draw the conclusion that the mapping is appropriate/reasonable. Specifically there were more than 40 confirming SC 13 filings with CUSIP 553044108. There were more than 100 SC 13 filings with CUSIP 09069N108 and more than 15 with CUSIP 68404L102. I would argue that the evidence is reasonable. However, you need to understand that we just analyzed the filings. We tested the validity of the CUSIPS we found and created tests relating to characteristics of the filing, the filer and the issuer. However, we don’t know what we don’t know. I have been trying to find errors, I suspect there can be some but we have done extensive testing.
Remember, the first six characters of the CUSIP are issuer specific, so we also added the BASE_CUSIP value(s) (09069N, 553044 and 68404L) as an additional field, just in-case. We clearly do not have every CIK mapped to a CUSIP. For some issuers they do not have any SC 13 filings. For others, the evidence is not strong enough (5 filings total, 3 with one CUSIP and 2 with another). There are those that report the SEDOL of the underlying security rather than the CUSIP of the ADR. We are also working with another data source that will yield some additional mappings.
Finally, you can filter on CIK – to access the entire listing just hit the Execute button without setting any operators/criteria. And of course you can export the results using the Save Results button.
