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Show HN: I built an AI tool to analyze SEC filings the minute they're released

62 points by docdeltaneer 2y ago

Hello everyone, I built this tool on Next/Node to automatically analyze new filings from the SEC and probe the Edgar API for new filings 24/7. We use AI to analyze the filings the second they are released. Free accounts to look at real filings (automatically updated) are available to any who sign up. If you have any questions feel free to ask.

bdefig 2y ago
Have you tried selling to high-frequency traders / hedge funds? If they bite, it's probably not even worth having a low-cost/self-serve tier.
- richardw 2y ago
  I’d guess they’re already using this signal and if not they’d be more likely to do it at competitively high speed and internally, where they can control and iterate? Maybe crypto HFT since that’s a big more sluggish.
- instalabs 2y ago
  I'm in the business of selling AI tools to high-frequency traders / hedge funds and the bad news is that, most of them are so risk averse and/or technically illiterate that sometimes we joke that there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI.
  - GoldenMonkey 2y ago
    Let's do it :)
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    I think you might be slightly misunderstanding why you're struggling to sell. In finance, correctness matters. A tool that's mostly right most of the time, but radically incorrect sometimes is a very hard sell when there's battle tested and well understood boring tools out there that do the same thing.
    - donavanm 2y ago
      Ive heard many variations of this along the lines of pennies and steam rollers. Yes, you have to have positive EV across the strategy. And just about everyone makes money when times are good, or theres volatility that matches your strategy, or your pods null out a bunch of factors. But to survive long term you have to _not fail_ in a very repeatable and consistent manner. Long term success is risk and downside management.
  - addicted 2y ago
    > there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI. Maybe hedge funds are completely out of step with the rest of the finance world, but much of finance has been using AI for a long time. AI is old news at this point.
- Etheryte 2y ago
  Everyone who is anyone in the finance space has been doing stuff like this since way before LLMs were a thing, and they've put a lot of time and effort into their tools. This suggestion is kind of like saying you should try to sell your lemonade stand to Coca-Cola.
  - Kiro 2y ago
    This is not possible without LLMs. The interesting stuff is not the numbers but the soft values and insights. Go check out the example reports. With that said, I agree that hedge funds probably already have their own internal versions of this.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      This is a good example of Dunning-Kruger, no offense. Sentiment analysis has been used as a tool to guide investments since the late 90s and there are companies out there who have been doing it for decades. LLMs didn't really break any new ground here, they just made this more accessible for the masses.
      - petesergeant 2y ago
        > Sentiment analysis has been used as a tool ... since the late 90s Yes! > LLMs didn't really break any new ground here I don't think this is true. LLMs are a gigantic leap forward from any traditional sentiment analysis I've seen. Pre-2013, bag-of-words and TF-IDF were still state of the art. Call me out if you think I'm wrong, but hand-waving away the transformative power of LLMs here because we had some sentiment analysis approaches before seems unfair.
      - Kiro 2y ago
        Sounds like you are the one suffering from Dunning-Kruger. Just check out one of the reports and you will see that it's lots more than just "sentiment analysis", and much more dynamic.
  - bdefig 2y ago
    That's exactly what I'm saying. If you've got something novel/hard to replicate, it's a no-brainer for them to pick up at any price. If not, that's good to know too. Btw, Coca-Cola bought Minute Maid Lemonaide in 1960. :)
toomuchtodo 2y ago
How confident are you in wiring this up to trade immediately off of the output?
- docdeltaneer 2y ago
  Having tested this extensively against historical market movements, I'm quite confident in its analysis accuracy. After running it against countless filings and tracking post-filing price movements, the system's risk assessments and change detection have proven remarkably reliable - especially for catching subtle shifts in risk factors and management tone that often precede larger market moves. I personally rely on it for my own decisions, but like any tool, it's most effective when used as part of a broader analysis process. The system is great at rapidly surfacing the most significant changes in these massive documents and contextualizing them against historical patterns. That's incredibly valuable for making timely decisions, especially since the market often takes days or weeks to fully price in the implications of complex filing changes. That said, the analysis code has built in multiple validation layers and error handling because filings are just one piece of the market puzzle. The code is designed to be conservative - it'll fail closed rather than make questionable assertions. But for what it's designed to do - deep analysis of filing changes and their implications - it's proven to be a reliable tool for actual decision-making.
  - mistrial9 2y ago
    > The system is great at rapidly surfacing the most significant changes in these massive documents and contextualizing them against historical patterns. probably worth capturing a few successful situations and documenting that in some marketing way.. also probably worth capturing a few Very Big Fails and making a ticket out of that internally, to improve the system. Seize the day!
  - ezero 2y ago
    > Having tested this extensively against historical market movements, I'm quite confident in its analysis accuracy. This doesn't say anything. Exactly how much have you tested and what were the results?
- 2y ago
jebarker 2y ago
Naive question here: wouldn't the upside of keeping this secret and trading on it's output yourself far exceed what you can make in subscriptions?
- baal80spam 2y ago
  My first question when I saw the page.
  - cj 2y ago
    I think this tool surfaces information not previously immediately digestible by retail investors. Institutional investors have had systems like this in place for decades. LLMs might improve parsing the data in some ways, but this is (and was) completely doable before the LLM era, meaning there’s probably not a huge amount of secret sauce here worth protecting. If anything, a project like this simply improves the information asymmetry between retail and institutional investors.
- kelseyfrog 2y ago
  If it works, yes. If it doesn't work, no it's better to let others convince themselves. It's the same way creating your own get rich quick scheme is the actual way to get rich quick, not following someone else's scheme.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- colordrops 2y ago
  Sell shovels during a gold rush.
- andrewmcwatters 2y ago
  Everyone has access to this data.
- sprobertson 2y ago
  The information is freely available, this just makes it more readable https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent
z0r 2y ago
Who is Doc Delta?
whiplash451 2y ago
You would probably increase your subscription rate by not putting a signup page before the demo.
JSDevOps 2y ago
Your trading way after the fact in some cases.
carabiner 2y ago
It's priced in. I guarantee every major hedge fund had a prototype running within hours of GPT API being made public, and they're probably running it on real money right now.
ezero 2y ago
You are charging way too much and offering too little. $29/month to track 15 companies, $89 to track 50, and "Contact sales" for unlimited. The "AI Analysis" you have is too brief and doesn't tell me anything useful as an investor. Compare this to what https://quartr.com/products/quartr-core https://quartr.com/products/quartr-core is offering for $20/month. I know how difficult it is to build a tool like this and you've done a decent job. Just doesn't make sense to me to price it like this.
- gregdoesit 2y ago
  As someone who was a paid customer of Quartr: they do not offer the ability to look or search actual filings at the $20/month plan. Full text search starts from $500/month, and is an annual contract (so $6,000/month.) Pricing for these services is not cheap, given it can be very helpful for professional traders. (I’m no professional trader, and not even a trader. I just sometimes want to search for interesting things in transcripts, when I research a topic. I would pay for a decent service offering full text search for transcript search, to use it a few times per month (or perhaps even less frequently). Still not found a product that does it at a sensible price point for my use case - likely because my use case is not worth building a business on.)
  - sprobertson 2y ago
    Wow $6000/month for a $500/month subscription is a bad deal!
    - lallysingh 2y ago
      5*12=60, so assume $6k/yr.
- myhau 2y ago
  This has similar vibes to The Infamous Dropbox Comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
  - 2y ago
luxpir 2y ago
I like seeing trading tools released. Kudos. Barriers are falling, fees and such. APIs popping up and interest in markets growing. I'd be bullish on retail trading and its healthy future.
- rurp 2y ago
  If you mean that retail trading volume and opportunities to make money from it have a healthy future then I agree. But if you mean that retail traders themselves have a good outlook, in the sense that they will end up with more money overall than if tools and access were more limited, I couldn't disagree more. Retail stock traders have a terrible track record overall, and bits of additional market information here or there will do nothing to change that. Increased access to trading results in amateurs having less money.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
I think the world would be a better place if there were less efficiency in the market, not more.
simian1983 2y ago
Is there documentation for how you calculate the Risk Score?
tsurkoprt 2y ago
Here is a free alternative that seems to provide much more https://app.acclara.ai/sec https://app.acclara.ai/sec
- savy91 2y ago
  I fail to see how Acclara is relevant by looking at their homepage. The link you sent is behind a sign up page.
supplied_demand 2y ago
Congrats on the release! I really like what you've done here. Making existing professional trading tools more accessible is a great path. I'm especially intrigued by the use of AI to analyze the Risk Factors section. I've been working on a tool to SaaS increase sales by combing through 10-K Risk Factors and seeing which companies, industries, markets make the best sales targets. It becomes a matching algorithm between the value levers of the SaaS solution and the needs expressed in the Risk Factors section. Do you have any plans to incorporate economic data from the monthly releases by BLS, BEA, Census, Federal Reserve, etc.?
- docdeltaneer 2y ago
  A bit late, but thank you for this comment. Appreciate the feedback. The features are actively expanding. Currently we have added 8K's and Form-4s, for handling SEC filings coverage. As our userbase grows alongside their feature requests and analysis presents new data points worth investing into we will increase the scope on a bang for buck basis.

62 points by docdeltaneer 2y ago

bdefig 2y ago

Have you tried selling to high-frequency traders / hedge funds? If they bite, it's probably not even worth having a low-cost/self-serve tier.

richardw 2y ago
I’d guess they’re already using this signal and if not they’d be more likely to do it at competitively high speed and internally, where they can control and iterate? Maybe crypto HFT since that’s a big more sluggish.
instalabs 2y ago
I'm in the business of selling AI tools to high-frequency traders / hedge funds and the bad news is that, most of them are so risk averse and/or technically illiterate that sometimes we joke that there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI.
- GoldenMonkey 2y ago
  Let's do it :)
- Etheryte 2y ago
  I think you might be slightly misunderstanding why you're struggling to sell. In finance, correctness matters. A tool that's mostly right most of the time, but radically incorrect sometimes is a very hard sell when there's battle tested and well understood boring tools out there that do the same thing.
  - donavanm 2y ago
    Ive heard many variations of this along the lines of pennies and steam rollers. Yes, you have to have positive EV across the strategy. And just about everyone makes money when times are good, or theres volatility that matches your strategy, or your pods null out a bunch of factors. But to survive long term you have to _not fail_ in a very repeatable and consistent manner. Long term success is risk and downside management.
- addicted 2y ago
  > there's big alpha to be had in starting a hedge fund that simply embraces AI. Maybe hedge funds are completely out of step with the rest of the finance world, but much of finance has been using AI for a long time. AI is old news at this point.
Etheryte 2y ago
Everyone who is anyone in the finance space has been doing stuff like this since way before LLMs were a thing, and they've put a lot of time and effort into their tools. This suggestion is kind of like saying you should try to sell your lemonade stand to Coca-Cola.
- Kiro 2y ago
  This is not possible without LLMs. The interesting stuff is not the numbers but the soft values and insights. Go check out the example reports. With that said, I agree that hedge funds probably already have their own internal versions of this.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    This is a good example of Dunning-Kruger, no offense. Sentiment analysis has been used as a tool to guide investments since the late 90s and there are companies out there who have been doing it for decades. LLMs didn't really break any new ground here, they just made this more accessible for the masses.
    - petesergeant 2y ago
      > Sentiment analysis has been used as a tool ... since the late 90s Yes! > LLMs didn't really break any new ground here I don't think this is true. LLMs are a gigantic leap forward from any traditional sentiment analysis I've seen. Pre-2013, bag-of-words and TF-IDF were still state of the art. Call me out if you think I'm wrong, but hand-waving away the transformative power of LLMs here because we had some sentiment analysis approaches before seems unfair.
    - Kiro 2y ago
      Sounds like you are the one suffering from Dunning-Kruger. Just check out one of the reports and you will see that it's lots more than just "sentiment analysis", and much more dynamic.
- bdefig 2y ago
  That's exactly what I'm saying. If you've got something novel/hard to replicate, it's a no-brainer for them to pick up at any price. If not, that's good to know too. Btw, Coca-Cola bought Minute Maid Lemonaide in 1960. :)

toomuchtodo 2y ago

How confident are you in wiring this up to trade immediately off of the output?

docdeltaneer 2y ago
Having tested this extensively against historical market movements, I'm quite confident in its analysis accuracy. After running it against countless filings and tracking post-filing price movements, the system's risk assessments and change detection have proven remarkably reliable - especially for catching subtle shifts in risk factors and management tone that often precede larger market moves. I personally rely on it for my own decisions, but like any tool, it's most effective when used as part of a broader analysis process. The system is great at rapidly surfacing the most significant changes in these massive documents and contextualizing them against historical patterns. That's incredibly valuable for making timely decisions, especially since the market often takes days or weeks to fully price in the implications of complex filing changes. That said, the analysis code has built in multiple validation layers and error handling because filings are just one piece of the market puzzle. The code is designed to be conservative - it'll fail closed rather than make questionable assertions. But for what it's designed to do - deep analysis of filing changes and their implications - it's proven to be a reliable tool for actual decision-making.
- mistrial9 2y ago
  > The system is great at rapidly surfacing the most significant changes in these massive documents and contextualizing them against historical patterns. probably worth capturing a few successful situations and documenting that in some marketing way.. also probably worth capturing a few Very Big Fails and making a ticket out of that internally, to improve the system. Seize the day!
- ezero 2y ago
  > Having tested this extensively against historical market movements, I'm quite confident in its analysis accuracy. This doesn't say anything. Exactly how much have you tested and what were the results?
2y ago

jebarker 2y ago

Naive question here: wouldn't the upside of keeping this secret and trading on it's output yourself far exceed what you can make in subscriptions?

baal80spam 2y ago
My first question when I saw the page.
- cj 2y ago
  I think this tool surfaces information not previously immediately digestible by retail investors. Institutional investors have had systems like this in place for decades. LLMs might improve parsing the data in some ways, but this is (and was) completely doable before the LLM era, meaning there’s probably not a huge amount of secret sauce here worth protecting. If anything, a project like this simply improves the information asymmetry between retail and institutional investors.
kelseyfrog 2y ago
If it works, yes. If it doesn't work, no it's better to let others convince themselves. It's the same way creating your own get rich quick scheme is the actual way to get rich quick, not following someone else's scheme.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
colordrops 2y ago
Sell shovels during a gold rush.
andrewmcwatters 2y ago
Everyone has access to this data.
sprobertson 2y ago
The information is freely available, this just makes it more readable https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent

z0r 2y ago

Who is Doc Delta?

whiplash451 2y ago

You would probably increase your subscription rate by not putting a signup page before the demo.

JSDevOps 2y ago

Your trading way after the fact in some cases.

carabiner 2y ago

It's priced in. I guarantee every major hedge fund had a prototype running within hours of GPT API being made public, and they're probably running it on real money right now.

ezero 2y ago

You are charging way too much and offering too little. $29/month to track 15 companies, $89 to track 50, and "Contact sales" for unlimited. The "AI Analysis" you have is too brief and doesn't tell me anything useful as an investor. Compare this to what https://quartr.com/products/quartr-core https://quartr.com/products/quartr-core is offering for $20/month. I know how difficult it is to build a tool like this and you've done a decent job. Just doesn't make sense to me to price it like this.

gregdoesit 2y ago
As someone who was a paid customer of Quartr: they do not offer the ability to look or search actual filings at the $20/month plan. Full text search starts from $500/month, and is an annual contract (so $6,000/month.) Pricing for these services is not cheap, given it can be very helpful for professional traders. (I’m no professional trader, and not even a trader. I just sometimes want to search for interesting things in transcripts, when I research a topic. I would pay for a decent service offering full text search for transcript search, to use it a few times per month (or perhaps even less frequently). Still not found a product that does it at a sensible price point for my use case - likely because my use case is not worth building a business on.)
- sprobertson 2y ago
  Wow $6000/month for a $500/month subscription is a bad deal!
  - lallysingh 2y ago
    5*12=60, so assume $6k/yr.
myhau 2y ago
This has similar vibes to The Infamous Dropbox Comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224
- 2y ago

luxpir 2y ago

I like seeing trading tools released. Kudos. Barriers are falling, fees and such. APIs popping up and interest in markets growing. I'd be bullish on retail trading and its healthy future.

rurp 2y ago
If you mean that retail trading volume and opportunities to make money from it have a healthy future then I agree. But if you mean that retail traders themselves have a good outlook, in the sense that they will end up with more money overall than if tools and access were more limited, I couldn't disagree more. Retail stock traders have a terrible track record overall, and bits of additional market information here or there will do nothing to change that. Increased access to trading results in amateurs having less money.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

I think the world would be a better place if there were less efficiency in the market, not more.

simian1983 2y ago

Is there documentation for how you calculate the Risk Score?

tsurkoprt 2y ago

Here is a free alternative that seems to provide much more https://app.acclara.ai/sec https://app.acclara.ai/sec

savy91 2y ago
I fail to see how Acclara is relevant by looking at their homepage. The link you sent is behind a sign up page.

supplied_demand 2y ago

Congrats on the release! I really like what you've done here. Making existing professional trading tools more accessible is a great path. I'm especially intrigued by the use of AI to analyze the Risk Factors section. I've been working on a tool to SaaS increase sales by combing through 10-K Risk Factors and seeing which companies, industries, markets make the best sales targets. It becomes a matching algorithm between the value levers of the SaaS solution and the needs expressed in the Risk Factors section. Do you have any plans to incorporate economic data from the monthly releases by BLS, BEA, Census, Federal Reserve, etc.?

docdeltaneer 2y ago
A bit late, but thank you for this comment. Appreciate the feedback. The features are actively expanding. Currently we have added 8K's and Form-4s, for handling SEC filings coverage. As our userbase grows alongside their feature requests and analysis presents new data points worth investing into we will increase the scope on a bang for buck basis.