An open API for company SEC filings

There&#x27;s no need for a third party &quot;open API&quot; for SEC filings. The SEC already has one.[1] You can also download all SEC filings via FTP.<p>We&#x27;ve been indexing all SEC filings since 2000, from before the SEC had a public search engine. You can access them at &quot;www.downside.com&quot;. While the site hasn&#x27;t been updated in years, the indexing engine continues to run every day at 4AM, downloading the new SEC filing index for the day. Costs me $15 a month to keep it running.<p>There&#x27;s a paid commercial service, &quot;edgar-online.com&quot;, which also does this. They&#x27;ve been unnecessary since the SEC put up a search engine.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;searchedgar&#x2F;webusers.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sec.gov&#x2F;edgar&#x2F;searchedgar&#x2F;webusers.htm</a>

&quot;The information provided herein may be displayed and printed for your internal use only and may not reproduced, retransmitted, distributed, disseminated, sold, published, broadcast or circulated.&quot; That&#x27;s a curious definition of &quot;open.&quot;

This is a good idea but as others have highlighted the issue will be with data quality. At TagniFi we&#x27;ve been pretty vocal about the quality of the XBRL data because we find a lot of errors. Using the XBRL data directly from the SEC is the equivalent of drinking pond water since there is very little validation occurring[1]. This has resulted in a significant number of errors that will need to be corrected before consuming the data. We&#x27;ve automated some of this error correction but there are still quite a few that need human involvement. We also run all of the data through hundreds of QA checks to ensure data quality in the absence of validation.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tagnifi.com&#x2F;dont-drink-the-pond-water&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.tagnifi.com&#x2F;dont-drink-the-pond-water&#x2F;</a>

I&#x27;ve lately spent a lot of time trudging through 10-K&#x27;s and financial data, so this is really cool! I&#x27;ve almost made this exact service myself on a number of occasions but stopped due to the unreliability of XBRL, which meant that even if I had a sweet API I&#x27;d still have to go back and double-check the numbers by hand.<p>For me, Excel integration with products like CapIQ is good enough -- for now.

Glad to see this got some good upvotes and discussion as some investors aren&#x27;t even aware of the wealth of information SEC filings contain. Having worked with the SEC&#x27;s archaic Edgar &quot;database&quot; with another provider of free SEC Filings and API[1], I respect what Kimonolabs is doing.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.Last10K.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.Last10K.com</a>

We use the SEC Edgar API&#x2F;XBRL&#x2F;FTP datasets with a good amount of success over at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cymetica.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;cymetica.com</a><p>This may seem counter-intuitive, but we are glad to see more advancement is being made in this area which results in greater opportunity for information arbitrage.