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Has anyone made a robust tool for analyzing the XBRL data the SEC mandated companies file with their 10-Q’s and 10-K’s? Seems like a big opportunity.

by voisin 6y ago

eigenvalue 6y ago
Not a good one that is targeted at non-professional investors. I agree, it's a good opportunity. The issue is that companies have a lot of latitude in how they use XBRL once you get outside of the totally standard financial metrics like revenue, gross profit, total liabilities, etc. And those are the metrics that are already largely available in services such as Yahoo Finance for free. What would be really valuable is taking company specific metrics such as unit volumes, orders, backlog, etc. And that requires a ton of work for each company and some knowledge of what the business does. Also, a lot of that data is not yet broken out into XBRL. For example, look how much data from THO (an RV manufacturer) is useful but not detailed in XBRL fields: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/000073026320000019/tho-20200731.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/00007... You can see which parts have XBRL tags by the red lines above and below. If you search the document for "orders" or "units" you can see lots of great information that is basically stranded. I've always thought that it shouldn't be that hard to use a bunch of heuristic rules to find data that is present in the last N 10-K or 10-Q filings (particularly because they tend to reference the previous year results, so you can search for numbers that are the same that are located within K words of certain strings). But it's hard to do something really useful as a one-person effort with some clever coding, which is probably why the services that are out there are niche and expensive.
- bfrink 6y ago
  Calcbench (https://www.calcbench.com/ https://www.calcbench.com/) does this, but as others point out, XBRL is a bit of a mess
- phyalow 6y ago
  CAPIQ basically do this, they normalise it with a human analyst too. Credit Suisse's Holt product also does this.
iav 6y ago
I've looked into the XBRL data - it's closer to an XML version of each company's 10-K rather than a unified accounting/reporting system for all public companies. If one company reports their income statement using 20 lines and another uses 15 lines, the XBRL data will show both exactly as they appear in the 10-K and they would not be comparable (unless your software can understand that "Net Interest Expense/(Income)" for one is the same thing as the sum of "Interest Expense" and "Interest Income" for the other). To add to that I've found some companies are filing XBRL is a non-conforming XML standard (probably software issues) and some companies just include the last 3 years of data in every XBRL document (rather than just picking the same data that's reported in the 10-K), making the consumer figure out what is the actual new information in the document.
- texasbigdata 6y ago
  Bigger issue, as learnt from capitalIQ, is restatements. They are SO common. Not as in mistakes that were made but also on reclassification of business lines, discontinued operations, etc etc. So just parsing is not sufficient, there’s a probably hair pulling historical alignment exercise underneath as well.
tagnifi 6y ago
We (https://tagnifi.com https://tagnifi.com) offer standardized fundamentals based on the XBRL data. As others have stated, XBRL is complex and full of corner cases. Our standardization process softens these sharp edges.
spxdcz 6y ago
We use XBRL data for lots of our underlying data on https://docoh.com https://docoh.com e.g. financial statements at https://docoh.com/company/1326801/FB/financials https://docoh.com/company/1326801/FB/financials and data charting at https://docoh.com/company/data-explorer/1326801 https://docoh.com/company/data-explorer/1326801 It's not perfect – XBRL is complicated and companies file with lots of proprietary metrics that aren't included in GAAP/FASB standards – but we hope to do more with it in the coming months.

Has anyone made a robust tool for analyzing the XBRL data the SEC mandated companies file with their 10-Q’s and 10-K’s? Seems like a big opportunity.

by voisin 6y ago

Has anyone made a robust tool for analyzing the XBRL data the SEC mandated companies file with their 10-Q’s and 10-K’s? Seems like a big opportunity.

eigenvalue 6y ago

Not a good one that is targeted at non-professional investors. I agree, it's a good opportunity. The issue is that companies have a lot of latitude in how they use XBRL once you get outside of the totally standard financial metrics like revenue, gross profit, total liabilities, etc. And those are the metrics that are already largely available in services such as Yahoo Finance for free. What would be really valuable is taking company specific metrics such as unit volumes, orders, backlog, etc. And that requires a ton of work for each company and some knowledge of what the business does. Also, a lot of that data is not yet broken out into XBRL. For example, look how much data from THO (an RV manufacturer) is useful but not detailed in XBRL fields: https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/000073026320000019/tho-20200731.htm https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/730263/00007... You can see which parts have XBRL tags by the red lines above and below. If you search the document for "orders" or "units" you can see lots of great information that is basically stranded. I've always thought that it shouldn't be that hard to use a bunch of heuristic rules to find data that is present in the last N 10-K or 10-Q filings (particularly because they tend to reference the previous year results, so you can search for numbers that are the same that are located within K words of certain strings). But it's hard to do something really useful as a one-person effort with some clever coding, which is probably why the services that are out there are niche and expensive.

bfrink 6y ago
Calcbench (https://www.calcbench.com/ https://www.calcbench.com/) does this, but as others point out, XBRL is a bit of a mess
phyalow 6y ago
CAPIQ basically do this, they normalise it with a human analyst too. Credit Suisse's Holt product also does this.

iav 6y ago

I've looked into the XBRL data - it's closer to an XML version of each company's 10-K rather than a unified accounting/reporting system for all public companies. If one company reports their income statement using 20 lines and another uses 15 lines, the XBRL data will show both exactly as they appear in the 10-K and they would not be comparable (unless your software can understand that "Net Interest Expense/(Income)" for one is the same thing as the sum of "Interest Expense" and "Interest Income" for the other). To add to that I've found some companies are filing XBRL is a non-conforming XML standard (probably software issues) and some companies just include the last 3 years of data in every XBRL document (rather than just picking the same data that's reported in the 10-K), making the consumer figure out what is the actual new information in the document.

texasbigdata 6y ago
Bigger issue, as learnt from capitalIQ, is restatements. They are SO common. Not as in mistakes that were made but also on reclassification of business lines, discontinued operations, etc etc. So just parsing is not sufficient, there’s a probably hair pulling historical alignment exercise underneath as well.

tagnifi 6y ago

We (https://tagnifi.com https://tagnifi.com) offer standardized fundamentals based on the XBRL data. As others have stated, XBRL is complex and full of corner cases. Our standardization process softens these sharp edges.

spxdcz 6y ago

We use XBRL data for lots of our underlying data on https://docoh.com https://docoh.com e.g. financial statements at https://docoh.com/company/1326801/FB/financials https://docoh.com/company/1326801/FB/financials and data charting at https://docoh.com/company/data-explorer/1326801 https://docoh.com/company/data-explorer/1326801 It's not perfect – XBRL is complicated and companies file with lots of proprietary metrics that aren't included in GAAP/FASB standards – but we hope to do more with it in the coming months.