6 ms·

How can a lay-person investor get as-soon-as-possible access to recently filed form 8-K? What's the gate and delay time?

by dpflan 3y ago

rekttrader 3y ago
Generally 24-48 hours depending on when Edgar updates. You can also download the daily filings directly from the sec.... it’s what Bloomberg does.
- pc86 3y ago
  This is objectively wrong.
siftrics 3y ago
All 8-Ks are available to the public on the SEC's EDGAR wesbite. As far as I know, 8-Ks are posted there on the day of filing. That could be wrong and there may be a quicker way to get them.
rmah 3y ago
There's no delay, they're available immediately to everyone on the SEC EDGAR site (https://www.sec.gov/edgar https://www.sec.gov/edgar).
breput 3y ago
This is practically real time: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=8-K&owner=include&count=40&action=getcurrent https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=... also available as an RSS/Atom format feed: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&CIK=&type=8-K&company=&dateb=&owner=include&start=0&count=40&output=atom https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&C... There is also a paid-for service called PDS (https://www.sec.gov/oit/announcement/public-dissemination-service-system-contact https://www.sec.gov/oit/announcement/public-dissemination-se...) which isn't necessarily any faster but can be more reliable.
- est31 3y ago
  Your first two links don't push the message though, so you have to keep refreshing the site quickly.
  - TylerE 3y ago
    Push is expensive (in volume) so it’s not really surprising they don’t offer it for free.
    - throwaway50603 3y ago
      Isn't it more expensive to have many people poll frequently?
      - gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
        Might not. Caching plus nginx would allow pretty decent performance. Not sure how expensive misses would be.
      - breput 3y ago
        The entire public sec.gov site, including filing data, is served from the Akamai CDN. But there is also an AUP (https://www.sec.gov/os/accessing-edgar-data https://www.sec.gov/os/accessing-edgar-data) which limits the number of requests per second, which in reality is quite a bit less than is documented.
      - TylerE 3y ago
        Vs push where someone sets up to receive it and then… never turns it off?
  - breput 3y ago
    If that is a problem and it is worth it to you, you pay for PDS - https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/pds-new-subscriber-040819.pdf https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/pds-new-subscriber-040819.pdf
- scrum-treats 3y ago
xwdv 3y ago
Before you think about making something that quickly reads 8-K filings and acts upon it: don’t bother. A bunch of entities are already doing this way faster than you ever can through various methods and by the time you get the data the opportunity to act is gone.
- 317070 3y ago
  I believe the current SOTA is to submit trades in the order of 10ms after the document is available online. In that time they downloaded the file, ran sentiment analysis on it and ran the numbers, decided which way to go and sent the trades to the market. It's worth every penny to be first, but unless you have a lot of pennies, you won't be first.
- neilv 3y ago
  Despite being a Boglehead (total-market index investor), who thinks that's the best tablescraps I can get, when I can't be in the club of the people who're making the real money from the systems... I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.). Then I realize I was considering actively profiting off the misery of other retail investors, and decide to just stick to my index funds.
  - andylynch 3y ago
    The Inverse Cramer ETF (SJIM) would be right up your alley.
  - n2d4 3y ago
    > I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.). Generally, this idea doesn't work because "manipulated"/misled retail investors will still be right 50% of the time. Being bad at trading gets you zero EV, not negative. But if you look closely, those retail investors pay fees and spread, and if you find a way to collect those, you have a strategy. Usually, spread protects the security seller against adverse selection and market movements. But if you sell to someone who certainly doesn't know more than you do, you can just collect the spread without taking any of the risks. This is why payment-for-order-flow is viable, and why retail traders get lower fees on platforms like Robinhood than professional traders on platforms like IBKR Pro. Whatever you do, you're probably not going to find a better strategy than the multi-billion dollar hedge funds trying to do the exact same thing but with a team of 200, and you'd just end up as one of those "retail investors" you'd try to exploit. Boglehead is the smart choice.
quickthrowman 3y ago
SEC’s EDGAR database has the filings available to everyone the moment they’re released. It will take you 5-10x longer to press F5 than it takes a bank/hedge fund to have a bot ingest the news and trade off of the new information. Even if you could ingest the information instantly, your orders will be slower than the people who are co-located within the same data center as the exchange, or the folks who set up private microwave relay networks between Chicago and NYC.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  The very fact that people go to such lengths to rig trading systems in their favor suggests they're not worth retaining in their current form.
  - hef19898 3y ago
    Like Robinhood and all those other "free" trading plattforms?
  - quickthrowman 3y ago
    You could make the argument it benefits anyone who sells equities, right now SPY has a penny wide bid/ask spread. One basis point is an extremely tight spread on an instrument that costs $413/unit. Pre-2001 the minimum tick size was $0.0625, and pre-1997 it was $0.125, I’ll take $0.01 spreads any day.
hbcondo714 3y ago
There are over 30 different types[1] of 8Ks and receiving notifications on all of them will inundate your inbox. It's a shameless plug but my freemium 'lay-person investor' site[2] will allow you to filter and select which 8Ks to view and receive notifications on. For example, you can receive an email every time a company files an event about a Bankruptcy / Receivership: https://last10k.com/stock-screeners/bankruptcy-receivership https://last10k.com/stock-screeners/bankruptcy-receivership [1] https://www.sec.gov/answers/form8k.htm https://www.sec.gov/answers/form8k.htm [2] https://last10k.com https://last10k.com
oxfordmale 3y ago
OpenAI is going to make a difference here. These filings are often challenging to read for a lay man. However, ChatGPT should be able to have a decent go at mood analysis. Until companies start rewriting their articles to be OpenAI "proof"
- alfalfasprout 3y ago
  there are already several companies that offer machine readable digests. Not sure you want an LLM to do this b/c the risk of it hallucinating is terrifying.
  - brookst 3y ago
    Using hallucinations as evidence that LLM’s can’t be useful for summarizing today is like saying airplanes can’t be used for intercontinental travel in 1980.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Actually, those SEC filings are not that jard to read. I had a collegue who used ChatGPT to summarize those for him. Since even SEC filings contain letters to shareholders, all they got was a ChatGPT version of that, missing all the relevant and important stuff about risks and such. Also, what is not written in those filings is at at least as important as what is written, ChatGPT utterly fails here.

How can a lay-person investor get as-soon-as-possible access to recently filed form 8-K? What's the gate and delay time?

by dpflan 3y ago

How can a lay-person investor get as-soon-as-possible access to recently filed form 8-K? What's the gate and delay time?

rekttrader 3y ago

Generally 24-48 hours depending on when Edgar updates. You can also download the daily filings directly from the sec.... it’s what Bloomberg does.

pc86 3y ago
This is objectively wrong.

siftrics 3y ago

All 8-Ks are available to the public on the SEC's EDGAR wesbite. As far as I know, 8-Ks are posted there on the day of filing. That could be wrong and there may be a quicker way to get them.

rmah 3y ago

There's no delay, they're available immediately to everyone on the SEC EDGAR site (https://www.sec.gov/edgar https://www.sec.gov/edgar).

breput 3y ago

This is practically real time: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=8-K&owner=include&count=40&action=getcurrent https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=&CIK=&type=... also available as an RSS/Atom format feed: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&CIK=&type=8-K&company=&dateb=&owner=include&start=0&count=40&output=atom https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&C... There is also a paid-for service called PDS (https://www.sec.gov/oit/announcement/public-dissemination-service-system-contact https://www.sec.gov/oit/announcement/public-dissemination-se...) which isn't necessarily any faster but can be more reliable.

est31 3y ago
Your first two links don't push the message though, so you have to keep refreshing the site quickly.
- TylerE 3y ago
  Push is expensive (in volume) so it’s not really surprising they don’t offer it for free.
  - throwaway50603 3y ago
    Isn't it more expensive to have many people poll frequently?
    - gadflyinyoureye 3y ago
      Might not. Caching plus nginx would allow pretty decent performance. Not sure how expensive misses would be.
    - breput 3y ago
      The entire public sec.gov site, including filing data, is served from the Akamai CDN. But there is also an AUP (https://www.sec.gov/os/accessing-edgar-data https://www.sec.gov/os/accessing-edgar-data) which limits the number of requests per second, which in reality is quite a bit less than is documented.
    - TylerE 3y ago
      Vs push where someone sets up to receive it and then… never turns it off?
- breput 3y ago
  If that is a problem and it is worth it to you, you pay for PDS - https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/pds-new-subscriber-040819.pdf https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/pds-new-subscriber-040819.pdf
scrum-treats 3y ago

xwdv 3y ago

Before you think about making something that quickly reads 8-K filings and acts upon it: don’t bother. A bunch of entities are already doing this way faster than you ever can through various methods and by the time you get the data the opportunity to act is gone.

317070 3y ago
I believe the current SOTA is to submit trades in the order of 10ms after the document is available online. In that time they downloaded the file, ran sentiment analysis on it and ran the numbers, decided which way to go and sent the trades to the market. It's worth every penny to be first, but unless you have a lot of pennies, you won't be first.
neilv 3y ago
Despite being a Boglehead (total-market index investor), who thinks that's the best tablescraps I can get, when I can't be in the club of the people who're making the real money from the systems... I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.). Then I realize I was considering actively profiting off the misery of other retail investors, and decide to just stick to my index funds.
- andylynch 3y ago
  The Inverse Cramer ETF (SJIM) would be right up your alley.
- n2d4 3y ago
  > I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.). Generally, this idea doesn't work because "manipulated"/misled retail investors will still be right 50% of the time. Being bad at trading gets you zero EV, not negative. But if you look closely, those retail investors pay fees and spread, and if you find a way to collect those, you have a strategy. Usually, spread protects the security seller against adverse selection and market movements. But if you sell to someone who certainly doesn't know more than you do, you can just collect the spread without taking any of the risks. This is why payment-for-order-flow is viable, and why retail traders get lower fees on platforms like Robinhood than professional traders on platforms like IBKR Pro. Whatever you do, you're probably not going to find a better strategy than the multi-billion dollar hedge funds trying to do the exact same thing but with a team of 200, and you'd just end up as one of those "retail investors" you'd try to exploit. Boglehead is the smart choice.

quickthrowman 3y ago

SEC’s EDGAR database has the filings available to everyone the moment they’re released. It will take you 5-10x longer to press F5 than it takes a bank/hedge fund to have a bot ingest the news and trade off of the new information. Even if you could ingest the information instantly, your orders will be slower than the people who are co-located within the same data center as the exchange, or the folks who set up private microwave relay networks between Chicago and NYC.

anigbrowl 3y ago
The very fact that people go to such lengths to rig trading systems in their favor suggests they're not worth retaining in their current form.
- hef19898 3y ago
  Like Robinhood and all those other "free" trading plattforms?
- quickthrowman 3y ago
  You could make the argument it benefits anyone who sells equities, right now SPY has a penny wide bid/ask spread. One basis point is an extremely tight spread on an instrument that costs $413/unit. Pre-2001 the minimum tick size was $0.0625, and pre-1997 it was $0.125, I’ll take $0.01 spreads any day.

hbcondo714 3y ago

There are over 30 different types[1] of 8Ks and receiving notifications on all of them will inundate your inbox. It's a shameless plug but my freemium 'lay-person investor' site[2] will allow you to filter and select which 8Ks to view and receive notifications on. For example, you can receive an email every time a company files an event about a Bankruptcy / Receivership: https://last10k.com/stock-screeners/bankruptcy-receivership https://last10k.com/stock-screeners/bankruptcy-receivership [1] https://www.sec.gov/answers/form8k.htm https://www.sec.gov/answers/form8k.htm [2] https://last10k.com https://last10k.com

oxfordmale 3y ago

OpenAI is going to make a difference here. These filings are often challenging to read for a lay man. However, ChatGPT should be able to have a decent go at mood analysis. Until companies start rewriting their articles to be OpenAI "proof"

alfalfasprout 3y ago
there are already several companies that offer machine readable digests. Not sure you want an LLM to do this b/c the risk of it hallucinating is terrifying.
- brookst 3y ago
  Using hallucinations as evidence that LLM’s can’t be useful for summarizing today is like saying airplanes can’t be used for intercontinental travel in 1980.
hef19898 3y ago
Actually, those SEC filings are not that jard to read. I had a collegue who used ChatGPT to summarize those for him. Since even SEC filings contain letters to shareholders, all they got was a ChatGPT version of that, missing all the relevant and important stuff about risks and such. Also, what is not written in those filings is at at least as important as what is written, ChatGPT utterly fails here.