I have been meaning to post about this issue for a while but have been reluctant to bite the hand that feeds us. Frankly, in my opinion the enhancements to the EDGAR UI make it tougher to use. I have always been a fan of the Classic version. In the past when I have been deep into some work relating to filings, if I wanted to look at a filing or two to figure something out I would open EDGAR, type in the name of the company. When I would land on the company/filer page I would select the Classic version and then type in the name of the form I wanted to review in the Filing Type box. Select the link to open the landing page for that particular filing and then open the specific document I wanted. I could then use CTRL+F to roam around within the document and easily use the scroll bar as needed.
You can’t do that anymore with the iXBRL javascript powered filings. If you accidentally click on a field that has embedded data then it is over. One way to get around that is to remember to use the Menu on the left corner to select Open as HTML I am not a fan at all.
Our interface provides a much faster option – I have been relying on that option almost exclusively for more than a couple of years. We have the CNAME as an indexed field for all documents – which makes it trivial to focus on one filer. So suppose I want to review all of Intel’s 10-K filings from 1994-2024 that include the phrase risk factors. The steps to do this are:
- Select the relevant indexes
- Use the fields button to select the CNAME field and then type Intel in the Value to Search field – hit OK so the value is added to the Search Phrase box.
- Type and or hit the and button
- Use the fields button to select the DOCTYPE field and then type 10K* in the Value to Search field – hit OK so the value is added to the Search Phrase box
- Type and or hit the and button
- Type “risk factors in the Search Phrase box
- Hit the Perform Search box,
Because there is no filtering (the search is restricted to documents that meet the CNAME and DOCTYPE criteria so it takes mere seconds to get access to these documents.
Usually I am working on one of our servers – so I don’t have to deal with the start-up costs – but our interns aren’t able to log-in that way – instead they have to use the AppStream interface. I decided to use AppStream to compare running that search to using EDGAR.
So while I did have to wait for my instance to fire-up, connect to the database that stores my identity and make the connection to the drive that is unique to me (that is what is happening during that initial start lag. Once I was connected and ran the search – it took 3 seconds to identify and load every 10-K filed by Intel that had the phrase risk factors.
I introduced some noise by not precisely stating the name – you can see I have a filing from ARIAS INTEL CORP. More to the point – I have access to each one of those filings with minimal effort.
Usually when I need access to filings I am dealing/exploring exceptions or data collection objectives and I will look at 50 or more filings from specific companies during one work session. If you can imagine, next I want to look at Union Pacific’s 10-K’s so I just need to change the CNAME value to Union Pacific. It took less than a second to have access to all of their 10-K filings with a risk disclosure as you can see in the next image.
Usually, I am trying to sort out some exception while trying to parse or collect the data the filing. So I want to look at the source code in the filing. Thus, I can use the Open Document button – the filing will open up in the browser and I can use the right-click context menu to View page source.
I think this approach is a lot less frustrating and significantly faster than going to EDGAR.
For a related example, my son Patrick is an intern for a policy advocating group in DC – he texted me yesterday because they are working on something related to the SEC and he needed to look at Cyber Security Item 1.05 disclosures. In this case he just wanted to look at all of the disclosures to generate some sense of their value (so far they don’t look useful other than to collect dates). He knew that Microsoft had some breach but was curious about others and the nature of their disclosure. He wondered if I could help.
I reminded him about using the ITEM fields for 8-K filings and told him that the disclosures did not begin until mid-December 2023. Here is the setup
It took one second to load every document tagged with ITEM_1.05.
Even if you knew the names of all of the companies that have made these disclosures – think how brutal it is to go find them. First, you have to type in the company name, then you have to click to Classic view. The you have to type 8-K in the Filing type field and then you have to CTRL+F to search for 1.05. Ultimately, I think that if I had to solve that problem using EDGAR I would spend more time getting access to the individual documents than I would spend actually reading content.
The bottom line is that he was able to focus on content rather than sweating through the details of access.