|
BUSINESSWEEK ONLINE: DAILY BRIEFING | |||||||||||
| |||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||
Putting a Friendly Face on the EDGAR Database The SEC's treasure chest of financial data can be tough to fathom, unless you use one of these helpful sites In the world of investing, especially in the age of the Internet, the source of your information is all-important. Misinformation, whether from fraudulent Web sites, sloppy online journalism, or confusion on message boards, has led many an investor to make a regrettable trade. Most important information for investors is publicly available on financial documents that public companies are required to file with the Securities & Exchange Commission. That's why having a pipeline into the SEC's electronic database, called EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis & Retrieval), is crucial for any investor. Getting to EDGAR is easy enough: It's available to anyone with a Web browser at the SEC's Web site (www.sec.gov). The problem is that even though the data you need is somewhere in there, it's usually cloaked in endless financial tables and obfuscatory prose. In addition, once you get the form you want, you're faced with an unfriendly, text-only format that's difficult to read on screen and will cause the felling of a few trees if you print it out in its entirety. BEST AND EASIEST. That's where the commercial interfaces to EDGAR come in. These sites, some available free, others for a fee, put a navigable interface on top of the SEC database that allows you to search and read the documents more quickly and easily. Although there are a handful of such sites, such as FreeEDGAR (www.freeedgar.com) and EdgarScan (http://edgarscan.tc.pw.com/), the best and easiest of the Edgar databases is EDGAR Online (www.edgar-online.com). This site has a section that costs $9.95 a month, but most of it is free -- including a number of services unavailable anywhere else. Of course, the primary use you'll make of any EDGAR Web site is to search for a document that has been filed with the SEC. EDGAR Online does that as well as or better than anyone else. For instance, I wanted to look at the most recent 10Q, which is the official name of the quarterly report form, of Bell Atlantic (BEL). I was able to find it in three clicks, using the Simple Search button. For a more challenging search, I looked for a 1997 America Online (AOL) 8K, which is a form that a company has to file if a meaningful event has occurred (such as a takeover attempt or change of CEO) in between the normal quarterly filings. This time, I had to use the Normal Search button, which allowed me to set the parameters for the document I was looking for, letting me go back to 1997 without wading through dozens of documents filed in the last two years. I was still able to get the document in less than four mouse clicks, and it took less than two minutes. EDGAR Online doesn't really shine until a form is up on your screen. To get there, you can choose between an HTML format or a Rich Text format. If you choose HTML, you will be presented with a screen with two frames. On the left side is an index of the document and on the right is the document itself. Click on any of the section headings on the left, and the right box will go right to that section. If you want to download the document into your word processor and then either view it there or print it out, choose the Rich Text format. That will transfer the form minus the awkward spacing and misaligned tables that often appear when you transfer a text-only document into a word processor. SPREADSHEET-READY. If you're more of a spreadsheet person, EDGAR Online does a wonderful thing for you. Its software automatically recognizes tables within a larger document and prepares them for downloading into Microsoft Excel, the most popular spreadsheet program. You can tell which tables have been thus prepared by the software because it adds the letters "xls" to the title of the document. Just click on "xls," and your computer will launch Excel (assuming it's installed) and display the table in spreadsheet form, with its columns properly aligned. One problem that I found, though, was that the software didn't always recognize every table as a table, which meant that it didn't automatically translate it for easy downloading into Excel. When I called up the toll-free service number, I was told that the software was buggy, and that "we're still fine-tuning our system." So I had to cut and paste into Excel the table I was looking for -- a painful process that took eight minutes. That didn't sour me on the site, however. Such disappointments were offset by surprising touches hidden within the search and display functions. For instance, if you want to read the document on your computer screen, a button lets you enlarge the font size. It seems like a small thing, but anyone who has spent an entire day reading financial statements on a computer screen understands how pleasant such a feature can be. INNER SECRETS. My favorite part of the site is the People Search function. I have seen this nowhere else, although other EDGAR sites will probably copy it soon. It lets you to search the entire EDGAR database for any document that has a person's name in it. For instance, I wanted to know how much of SBC Communications (SBC) is owned by its CEO, Edward Whitacre. I clicked on the People Search button and then, after a few misspellings, typed in Whitacre's name and chose to search only for proxy statements, since I knew those would have his stock holdings. It gave me a list of several SBC proxy statements, and I chose the most recent one. Once the document was on screen, I didn't have to read the entire thing to find Whiteacre. I just hit the Next button, and I was transported to the next mention of his name. After three clicks, I found that he owns 2,743,000 shares. I repeated the search for last year's proxy statement, and within five minutes had determined that Whitacre's SBC holdings have increased by more than 120% in the past 12 months. Such features are available free to anyone who registers with the site. If you're interested in getting real-time insider trading data, you can pay $9.95 a month and get access to EDGAR Online's proprietary database of 144 forms. Anyone in a senior managerial post or who owns more than 5% of a public company has to file a form called a 144 form when buying or selling stock in the company, even if it's only 50 shares. Although the forms are available to the public, they aren't required to be filed electronically. In order to compile a database, EDGAR Online pays to copy the paper forms and enter them manually. Such a database, while a gold mine for investors, is expensive to maintain, hence the fee. If you make frequent trades based on insider information, though, you'll go ahead and pay the fee -- for one of the most unique parts of a generally useful site. Jaffe writes about the markets for Business Week Online
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ |
 | |
 | |
 Assistive Technology barker.online Byte of the Apple Eye on Japan Hers.online Inside Wall Street Not-So-Neutral Corner Online Asia Power Lunch Privacy Matters Sector Scope Sound Money Street Wise Washington Watch News Flash Archive | ||||||
