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Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
Don’t worry! Use
to work for you.
Relax, enjoy and be creative. Unique Features of
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and the Database
Cloud Technology
SEC Filings for 1994-2015, daily updated
11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents
No need to install any software
Access anytime, anywhere
Don’t waste your time learning programming
No stop words, means you can use phrases
containing words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘not’, ‘of’, etc.
Incredibly fast, gets results in seconds
Search by specific resolution
o Paragraph, Table, Footnote
o Audit Report
o SOX 404 Management Reports
o SOX 404 Audit Reports
o MD&A
Search for unique financial information not
available anywhere
Search by SIC & CIK codes
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What are our customers saying?
Newark: Using Seek iNF I can search indexed
text files and instantaneously receive results to
my queries. The results include the context in
which the search terms appear, and
downloadable CSV files with the files' locations.
This is an indispensable tool for my research. I
feel that Seek iNF is the first accounting tool in a
new generation of research aids still needing to
emerge.
Professor Mike Minnis, University of Chicago: I’ve
really appreciated working with SeekEdgar. The
flexibility and speed of both the search engine
and customer service has made data collection
easier and more thorough. Finding examples for
my financial statement analysis class is also a
pleasure. I recommend trying SeekEdgar for
anybody looking for data from SEC filings.
Professor Uday Murthy, University of South
Florida: SeekEdgar is a fantastic system! Several
of our doctoral students and faculty have used
the system to retrieve many megabytes of data
for their research in a matter of seconds. Raj
and his team continue to make improvements to
the interface, which was already very intuitive
and easy to use. The ability to download
matching data points to an Excel file has proven
to be invaluable for our researchers. I highly
recommend the product.
Professor Srinivasan Rangan, Indian Institute of
Management at Bangalore: This is an excellent
product. Very convenient and easy to use. I
applaud Professor Raj Srivastava for offering this
product to the research community.
PhD Student Jack He, University of Texas-Dallas:
The Seek iNF is a great database. Comparing to
other databases, Seek iNF provides variable
ways to search, filter, and collect data. It's very
helpful in assisting my specific need. I
recommend that researchers try this database.
Professor Miklos Vasarhelyi, Rutgers University Search one type of filing or all types of filings
Search one company, a set or all companies
Download output in Excel Spreadsheet
Search using Boolean logic
o Exact phrases (AND, OR, Negation)
o With all of the words
o With at least one of the words
o Without the word
Proximity Search: two words within any number of
words
Wild card search (input the word with * at the end
of the word in “all the words” slot)
Search presence or absence of multiple phrases
Find number of occurrences of a word/phrase
Find total number of words
Download distribution of all the words in Excel
Compare any of the SEC Filings of one year with
another year by words or by lines
1 August 15, 2015 Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
What all can you search?
Letters (Correspondence), Response (Uploads),
424B1, 424B2, 424B3, 424B4, 424B5, 424B7, 424B8,
AAERS, and several Exhibits including Press Releases,
Conference Calls (updated every 20 min), Exhibit 95,
and Exhibit 21. Filings not present are added
frequently based on users suggestions. Let us know
if you want us to add any other filings.
Search 21+ years Data (1994-2015, daily updated):
10-K, 10-K/A, 10-KT, 10-KT/A, 10-K405, 10-K405/A,
10-KT405, 10-KT405/A, 10KSB, 10KSB/A, 10KSB40,
10KSB40/A, 10-Q, 10-Q/A, 10-QT, 10-QT/A, 10QSB,
10QSB/A, 20-F, 20-F/A, 40-F, 40-F/A, 8K, 8K/A, Forms
3, 3/A, 4, 4/A, 5, 5/A; 13F-HR, 13F-HR/A, 13F-NT,
13F-NT/A, S-1, S-1/A, DEF 14A, DEFA 14A, Comments
Please go to the website: https://www.seekedgar.com:8443/, and log-in by selecting “LOGIN/SEEK iNF” from
the top menu bar on the right and using your ID and Password. Also, explore various links, watch this
six minutes video and look at the slides for more details and examples:
Video :https://www.youtube.com/embed/O9BYW3FTX0I?rel=0
Slides: https://www.seekedgar.com:8443/UserGuide.pdf
Examples on How to use
to Take Advantage of Its Power
These examples are presented in two parts. Part I describes the basic features of the search engine using
several simple examples. Part II demonstrates the power use of the search engine. The power use may
involve multiple exact phrases and a combination of the other features of the search engine such as Proximity
Search, Wild Card Search, and the Boolean logic. It is important to note that all the filings and documents
(currently, about 11 million SCE Filings and 17 million documents, with daily updates) in our database
are pre-processed with no stop words. This means you can search the database with the exact phrases
containing words like ‘a’, ‘the’, ‘in’, ‘not’, ‘of’, etc.
Part I - The Basic Features
Example
1:
Search
Filings/Documents
Containing Certain Key Words: Suppose you
want to find all 10Ks that contain the following
words: futures, options, swaps, and hedging for
the years 1994-2014. Follow these steps:
of top 20 words are displayed on the right hand side
panel. In addition, in the same 9 seconds, you will
get frequency distribution of all the words
downloadable in MS Excel by clicking on the button
on the right hand side, just above the panel
displaying WORD COUNT. Download the output
results (list of all companies along with the company
specific information) in MS Excel by clicking on the
“Download Result” on the left hand side.
Step 1: Type the words separated by a space:
futures options swaps hedging in the slot “With
all of the words”.
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
we want all the companies, leave the default choice
“All” and select the desired time frame 1994-2014.
Step 3: Select Resolution: Paragraph (All).
Step 4: Select Document Type: all 10Ks.
Step 5: SUBMIT: Click on Submit button.
You can view original filing/document by clicking on
the button “View File” just above the middle display
window on the left. It is important to note that
you can perform a secondary search in the
display window by clicking on “Control & F keys”
simultaneously, and by typing the phrase to be
searched. You may need to click the search arrow
twice to see the phrase in the document. You can
also download the raw file from the SEC by clicking
“Download Raw File” above the middle display
window. The “Compare” button above the middle
display window on the right is to compare any filings
for two years by lines and by words.
In about 9 seconds or less, 16,449 10Ks are
obtained. The middle panel displays paragraphs
containing the key words highlighted in yellow. The
total word count with and without numbers in the
document are displayed on the right hand side for
the company highlighted on the left. Click on the
next company on the left hand side to get the total
word count for this company. Frequency distributions
2 Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
Screen shot of Results in Example 1
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la
p
is
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a
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l
Example 2: Drill down for the presence of
some and absence of some other exact
phrases. Suppose you want to find all companies
that have mentioned the phrase “Bonus plans” but
have not mentioned “Stock options” and “Equity
incentives” in DEF 14A & DEFA 14A during 19942014.
slot “With the exact phrase”
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
we want all the companies, leave the default choice
“All” and select the desired time frame 1994-2014.
Step 3: Select Resolution: Table
Table, Step 4: Select Document Type: Select 10K,
Step 5: SUBMIT.
Step 1: Enter Key word to Search: Type the phrases
Bonus plans -Stock options -Equity incentives in the
slot “With the exact phrase” (+ for presence and
– for absence)
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
we want all the companies, leave the default choice
“All” and select the desired time frame 1994-2014
Step 3: Select Resolution: Select Paragraph (All)
Step 4 - Select Document Type: Select DEF 14A
and DEFA 14A
Step 5: SUBMIT: Click on Submit button.
You can download the entire table in MS Excel or
copy and paste just that line item. Here is the
example:
2014
2015
Air traffic liability
$150,479
$138,890
Our system is unique. One can search by key
words even for financial information. We are
making this aspect even more robust and efficient.
Example 4: Count a given phrase in a
document
Suppose you want to count occurrence of a phrase,
say “Class Action” in 10Ks and 10K/As for the years
1994-2014.
Step 1: Type the phrase Class Action in the slot
“With the exact phrase” and check the counter
just below this slot.
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
we want all the companies, leave the default choice
“All” and select the desired time frame 1994-2014.
Step 3: Select Resolution: Select Paragraph (All)
Step 4: Select 10K and 10K/A
Step 5: Click on Submit button
In 9.9 seconds, 305 DEF 14As and DEFA 14As
are obtained. Paragraphs containing the key words
(highlighted) appear in the middle. You can
download the results and the word distribution as
described in Example 1.
Example 3: Unique Financial Information from
10K. There are many unique financial line items
that are not available in any of the current
databases. For example, you want to find Air Traffic
Liability for airline companies for the year 2015.
This information is not easily available. Here is what
you can do to get this number:
In about 35 seconds, all the counts for 21 + years
and the corresponding word distribution are
Step 1: Type the phrase Air Traffic Liability in the
3 Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
obtained. 37,434 10Ks and 10K/As contain the
phrase Class Action with the counts. There is no
system in the market that can determine the count
this efficiently. The left side panel gives the number
of occurrence of the phrase along with the company
specific information. One can download all the counts
by clicking the button “Download Results” at the
top of the left panel. We can provide the
download results if it takes too much time for
you to download. The middle panel displays the
paragraphs containing the phrase and the right hand
panel provides the total word count.
Part II- More Complex Examples
Use of Exact Phrases: You can search any document with a combination of exact phrases with
"AND", "OR", or any combination. Seek iNF uses "+" for AND, "|" for OR, and "-" for negation with or
without space before and after the symbol. Type the phrases in the "With the exact phrase" slot.
Suppose we have three phrases
Some Important points to remember:
represented by A, B, & C.
• “ With the exact phrase” and “Proximity
• For AND logic, type the phrases separated by
Search” work together as “AND” logic.
+ sign as: A + B + C.
• “With the exact phrase” and “With all the
• For OR logic, type the phrases separated by |
words” together work as “AND” logic.
symbol as: A | B | C.
• “With the exact phrase” and “With any one of
• For AND and OR: such as A&(B or C): Type
the words” work as “OR” logic.
A+(B|C).
• “Without the words” would work only when
• For AND and negation such as “A & B & notC”.
you are using another criterion.
Type as A+B-C.
• The Wild card search will not work in “With
• For OR and Negation such as “(A or B)& notC”.
the exact phrase” and “Proximity Search”.
Type as (A | B) –C.
-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐-­‐ Example 5: Another Unique Financial Information from 10K related to “R&D Tax Credit”
Step 1: Type the phrase R&D Tax Credit | Research
and Development Tax Credit in the slot “With the
exact phrase”
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
we want all the companies, leave the default choice
“All” and select the desired time frame
Step 3: Select Resolution: Select Table
Step 4: Select Document Type: Select 10K
Step 5: SUBMIT.
Here is a display of the snippet for one company
Example 6: Going Concern Opinions from 10Ks
Suppose you want to get all the companies that
received going concern opinion between 1994-2015
(as of 05-10-2015). This is easy; you can get this
result in few seconds. There is nothing in the market
that can give you such a result on-line, and as
current (daily updated). Here is what you need to do.
Step 1: Enter Key word to Search/With the exact
phrase. Type the following phrases in this slot: In our
opinion + Going concern + raise substantial doubt
about
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
we want all the companies, leave the default choice
4 Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
“All” and select the desired time frame 1994-2015.
Step 3: Select Resolution: paragraph (All)
Step 4: Select 10K (all versions of 10K)
Step 5: SUBMIT: Click on Submit button.
“In our opinion + Going concern + raise substantial
doubt about + Ernst Young”. To obtain the total
number of 10Ks for a given year, input ‘the’ in the
exact phrase slot or in the slot for all the words. The
following chart shows how GC audit opinion has
changed over the years. You can see around 2001 –
2002 it has increased, may be due to the SOX 2002
Act, and again there is an increase around 2009, this
may be due to the financial crisis. Also, as you can
see, the percentage of GC audit opinions is on the
upward trend. Does it mean that the audit
quality is getting better or businesses are
becoming more complex? The GC audit opinions
issued by accounting firms like EY and Deloitte have
had relatively fewer GC audit opinions during recent
years. What does it mean? Could it be that they are
not accepting bad clients? Similar studies can be
conducted in SOX reports and other areas, efficiently
and effectively using Seek iNF
You will get the results in seconds. Here is an
interesting research questions. How did the overall
Going Concern (GC) audit opinions change over time
and by accounting firms, and what does it tell us
about the quality of audit? In matter of seconds, you
can get the data using Seek iNF. Here is what you do
as described above. Insert the following phrases “In
our opinion + Going concern + raise substantial
doubt about” in the exact phrase slot, select all
companies, select the time period, select paragraph,
and 10Ks, and submit. In order to get the GC audit
opinions for a given accounting firm just add another
phrase for the name of the accounting firm in the
above set. For example, for Ernst & Young
accounting firm, you can insert the following phrase
Going Concern (GC) Opinion by Year Overall GC Opinions
GC Opinions by EY
GC Opinions by Deloitte
20 15 10 Year 5 2014 2013 2012 2011 2010 2009 2008 2007 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000 1999 1998 1997 1996 0 1195 5 1994 Percentage of GC Opinons 25 Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
Example 7: A Measure of Competition Based
on 10 K
A Measure of Competition Based on 10-K Filings by
Li, Lundholm, and Minnis, in Journal of Accounting
Research, Vol. 51 No. 2 May 2013, pp: 399-436.
we want all the companies, in SIC Code 4813, type
4813 in the slot for SIC and select the industry from
the drop down menu and leave the default choice
"All" in the slot "Company" and select the desired
time frame, say 1999.
Step 3: Select Resolution: Select Paragraph (All)
Step 4: Select Document Type: Select 10K
Step 5: SUBMIT: Click on Submit button
This paper computes management's perceptions of
the intensity of the competition using textual analysis
of the firm's 10-K filing. They count the number of
occurrences of “competition, competitor, competitive,
compete, competing,” including those words with an
"s" appended, and then remove any case where
"not," "less," "few," or "limited" precedes the word
by three or fewer words. Their measure of
competition is PCTCOMP = NCOMP/NWORDS, where
NCOMP = number of words in 10K as described
above and NWORDS = Total number of words
without numbers. Seek iNF yields these counts in
seconds.
In just 6 seconds, 88 companies in Telephone
Communication Industry that had the word
"competition" and no "less competition" are
obtained.
Download the word distribution for few companies
and compute the index. In each case it takes only
few seconds to get the distribution. Here are
PCTCOMPs for few companies for 1999. This is just
an illustration of the process involved. One needs to
remove the cases with the words few, limited, not as
mentioned in the paper:
Globix Corp: PCTCOMP = 1.003; IXNET Inc.:
PCTCOMP = 1.022; Airgate Wireless Inc.: PCTCOMP
= 2.820
Let
us
consider
companies
in
Telephone
Communication industry, SIC = 4813, and get the list
of companies that have mentioned the word
"Competition" but no mention of "Less
Competition" as one of the criteria of the authors
and obtain a measure of PCTCOMP as defined above.
Here is what you do in Seek iNF:
Step1: Enter Key word to Search: Type the following
Competition - less competition in the slot “With the
exact phrase”. This will look for the presence of the
word competition but absence of less competition.
Step 2: Select Company Name, SIC and Date: Since
Just for curiosity, we have computed PCTCOMP for
Globix for 1999 – 2015 to see if it has changed over
the years. It would be an interesting question, if it
changes then why? It seems the company did not
exist as Globix after 2006. Here are the results:
1999: 1.003; 2000: 0.153; 2001:0.285 ; 2002: 0.436;
2003: 0.435; 2004: 1.034; 2005: 1.728; 2006: 1.210.
Example 8: We May Never become Profitable
Did you know that there are public companies that
make statements in their annual reports (10Ks) that
they were not profitable and may never be profitable
and still investors invest money? Why is that? How
would you find out who they are? Manually it is
impossible! Well, Seek iNF can answer this question in
seconds. Insert the following phrases “We may never
become profitable | We May Never Achieve or Sustain
Profitability | we may never achieve or maintain
profitability” in the exact phrase slot, and select “all
companies”, the time period, and 10Ks, and get the
result in seconds. The following chart shows that such
companies started around 1998 and has been growing
in number since then. One can explore several
questions as to not only who these companies are but
to how can they survive so long even after making
such a statement. Some have survived 10 -12 years.
6 Another interesting question comes to mind is what
type of audit opinions were expressed by the
corresponding auditors. You would expect all such
companies should have received a Going Concern audit
opinion. This is easy to find out using Seek iNF. Insert
the following phrases “(We may never become
profitable | We May Never Achieve or Sustain
Profitability | we may never achieve or maintain
profitability)+ In our opinion + Going concern + raise
substantial doubt about” in the exact phrase slot and
select “all companies”, the time period, and 10Ks, and
get the result in seconds. The chart given below shows
an interesting result – not all such companies received
GC opinions. Why is that? What about audit quality?
Many interesting research questions emanate from this
result. Also, one can explore the nature of business
and industries of these companies without any efforts
with Seek iNF. Srivastava and Mock (2015) are working
on this aspect of the study.
Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
Example 9 (Professor Jide Wintoki, Finance
Faculty at KU): Suppose you want to know which
companies voluntarily adopted fair value option
expensing prior to the imposition of mandatory
expensing in 2005. This information is not
available via any of the usual WRDS datasets.
One way to do it is to do a Lexis-Nexis news search
for companies that announced the adoption of fair
value option expensing. Unfortunately this would not
yield a comprehensive sample of voluntary adopters
since some companies did not announce voluntary
adoption via press releases. So using Lexis-Nexis will
undercount voluntary adopters. Another possibility is
to read all the 10-Ks of companies between 2002 and
2005. This is a potentially months – or even yearlong labor intensive exercise, and one that is prone
to error. Because there is no standard adoption
language, each 10-K would need to be read carefully
while the reader pays attention to paragraphs that
discuss option expensing. There are over 1,000
potential adopters, which means reading at least
3,000 – 4,000 filings!
Seek iNF is thus particularly helpful. Using
search terms related to option expensing (e.g. “SFAS
123”, “SFAS 123-R”, “fair value”, “option expensing”,
etc.), one can generate in a matter seconds a list of
10-Ks that discuss option expensing. Even more
importantly, Seek iNF takes the reader right to the
paragraph of the 10-K that discusses option
expensing! This significantly reduces the amount of
time and effort required to put together a
comprehensive data set of companies that voluntarily
adopted fair value option expensing.
7 Anytime, Anywhere, SEC Filings at Your Finger Tips in Seconds, [11 million SEC Filings, 17 million documents]
Disclosures Related Issues in 8K and 8K/A
Here are several examples for disclosure related issues that one can use to obtain the data from our database.
(i) CFO Resignation
! Exact Phrase : Item 5.02 + departure of directors or certain officers + Chief Financial Officer;
! With all of the words: CFO
! With at least one of the words: retire resign revoke dismiss
(ii) Directors Resignation
! Exact Phrase : Item 5.02 + resigned as director
! Select all companies, the period, 8K and 8K/A and submit
(iii) Change of auditor, 8K, Exhibit 16 or Exhibit 16.1
! Exact Phrase: Item 4.01 + (Exhibit 16 | Exhibit 16.1) + Changes in Registrant's Certifying Accountant
! With all the words: Auditor
! Yielded 467 cases for 2014 year.
(iv) Auditor Resignation, 8K,
! Exact Phrase: Item 4.01 + Changes in Registrant's Certifying Accountant
! With all the words: Auditor Resignation
! Yielded 200 cases for 2014. Amongst various research questions, one may like to know what is the
reason of resignation? Is it disagreement with the client, going concern issue, or what? Such a query
can done easily using Seek iNF.
DEF 14A and DEFA 14A: Search for the name of the Chief Executive Officer or CEO in a company
! Exact Phrase: Chief Executive Officer | CEO
! Select the year and DEF 14A and DEFA 14A and submit.
Internal Control Related Issues related to SOX 404 Reports
If you want to explore questions related to SOX 404 report, you need to come up with an exact phrase to
search the database. For example if you want to find which companies received qualified opinion on internal
control over financial reporting, you need to use the following exact phrase and search: did not maintain
effective internal control over financial reporting. You will get immediately all the companies for the period
specified. You can further explore specific weakness etc by designing the appropriate exact phrase.
The opportunity is unlimited. With Seek iNF, it is your knowledge, curiosity, and imagination that
will drive the research questions. We keep making innovations to facilitate your research.
Contact Dr. Raj Srivastava at [email protected] or 785-218-4409 for more information or to
subscribe.
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