by Vikram Ramakrishnan

The current state of affairs

The Securities and Exchange Commission or SEC, is a US Government agency that enforces securities laws (particularly around what public companies can do and say). Their website houses a tremendous amount of information. Companies publish regular filings in the form of quarterly releases (10-Qs), annual reports (10-Ks), news releases (8-Ks) and a host of other types of filings on a routine basis.

Investors often pore over these filings to understand the current status of a company. From a programmatic perspective, it’s not easy to quickly retrieve the filings that you’d like to work with. These filings are only available via FTP in daily or quarterly dumps. It makes searching and filtering a subset of the filings impossible. For example, if you wanted to programmatically retrieve the last 3 years of 10-Ks, there is no simple or easy way to go about it.

Enter QuantLayer Filings

To help developers have easier access to this treasure trove of information we’re launching an API for these SEC filings.

With the QuantLayer Filings API we’re solving a common problem that developers working with filings through the SEC site have faced:

There is no real-time (or near real-time) API for SEC filings, nor is there an ability to quickly prototype filings related apps.

This prevents the equitable market discovery of information found in SEC filings.

Built on top of an Elixir & Phoenix backend, our API serves developers by offering an incredibly fast service to query SEC filings. They’ll be able to build phenomenal tools to investigate the valuable information in these filings.

Moreover, our API allows for near immediate access to new filings along with a nice JSON API developers will enjoy working with:

{

"cik": 0001418091,

"symbol": TWTR,

"text-link": https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000156459016013646/0001564590-16-013646.txt,

"html-link": https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1418091/000156459016013646/0001564590-16-013646-index.htm,

"title": 10-K - TWITTER, INC. (0001418091) (Filer),

"updated-date": 2016-02-29T13:00:33-04:00,

"category": 10-K

}

Working with this standard will let you quickly build on top of it.

Why we built this

I worked as analyst and portfolio manager for a hedge fund in Boston. I spent most of my time researching options trades based on extreme moves in stocks. Often, companies would hide or obfuscate key information in their SEC filings. A 10-K might contain some hidden gem that would reflect a major change or risk factor to a company. These were not easy to find. They’d require hours of time to pore over filings to determine what changed, whether or not that change was important and finally what kind of affect that change would have to the company’s underlying business and its stock.

Initially, when Faizaan and I started QuantLayer, we began to work on a tool that would programmatically capture all changes between filings and then deliver those to a user in a simple, intuitive format. If you come from the programming world you’ll probably be familiar with the term “diffing,” which is what we effectively wanted to do: Diff two SEC filings to generate notifications of the changes quickly. We implemented a simple version of this product: