Getting Tickers and Other Company Details Back with an XBRL API Data Call

 

There are three relevant Endpoints when trying to find a company to download.

1. cos/try (as shown above) enables you to search on a company name. Input at least five letters into the Company Box and it will return a list if matching companies when you refresh the query (Alt F5) as shown below.

2. cos/ will search by Ticker or CIK to return an exact match. In the case of a Ticker, it may return more than one result as it will show all the different companies that have used that Ticker since Companies have filed XBRL. The most common reason why two companies may have used the same Ticker would be where a company has morphed into a different legal entity so two companies, two CIK's. Don't worry when bringing back results we handle this by mapping the same Ticker to both companies to bring back a seamless series of results. Note: CIK's never change whereas Tickers for a company can.

3. cos/industry. You can use a SIC code with this Endpoint to bring back all companies with the same SIC. You could copy then SIC code for a target company into the industry box, select this Endpoint and the query will return all the companies operating in the same industry.

How to screen for the very latest filings in Excel

Now EDGAR is very good at showing you all the latest filings. But I wanted to take it a step further in my analysis of XBRL filings for the 2017 10-K reporting season. I also wanted to do it in Excel. By the way, this is all part of the Has the dream come true? series of posts and videos which you can follow starting from here.

If you have read my previous posts, you will know I have set up a control group of companies so we can see for real in this reporting season what we can and can't do with XBRL. Now I've needed to be able to monitor those filers, just as if they were my portfolio of potential investments. So we've added a watchlist feature to Xbrl sheet. Technologically, it's just a variation on the existing queries you can run in Xbrl sheet. It uses the same query file but you set different parameters to do some very powerful screening of the latest flings at the SEC.

Great thing about Excel data queries is that you can set them up to run whenever you want automatically, so when you open your workbook or indeed at regular intervals, say every hour.

You won't always know which companies your wish to watch so we've covered that by adding the ability to screen by filing date. Say for example, show my every company that filed yesterday (whisper it but you can actually search down to the latest minute so you could set it to show you all those that filed in the last hour for example. We update our database from the SEC in real time so as soon as it's available on EDGAR, it's available in Xbrl sheet). Not only that, you can filter by industry to build a peer group of real time filings. You can specify a particular SIC code or a wider range to pick a bigger industry grouping or search by filer (i.e. find filers in the same industry as your chosen target).

Anyway this video shows you how to do all that. And once you've identified a filing, you bring down all it's XBRL tagged data using the same mechanism in Xbrl sheet.

And there's an example sheet to play with here.