EDGAR Suite

Tool for the retrieval of corporate and financial data from SEC's EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) database.

URL

https://pypi.org/project/edgar-tool/

  • Source code is freely available on GitHub

  • Users can download edgar-tool (the CLI) directly from PyPI

EDGAR Database Overview

SEC's EDGAR database is a public repository of filings submitted by companies, mutual funds, and other entities required to report to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. EDGAR provides free access to hundreds of financial document filling types, including quarterly and annual reports, insider trading disclosures, and registration statements.

EDGAR aims to ensure equal access to corporate disclosures within the U.S. capital market. The database is freely accessible online for financial analysis and open-source intelligence in the finance sector. You can access the EDGAR UI at www.sec.gov/edgar/search/.

Bellingcat's edgar-tool Overview

edgar-tool provides programmatic access to SEC's EDGAR database from the command line. The CLI is feature-complete, meaning all queries you can perform on www.sec.gov/edgar/search/ are achievable with the CLI.

Here are a few of the reasons you might want to use edgar-tool:

  • Batch Downloading of Search Results: The EDGAR UI doesn't allow you to download all documents from a search text search at once. edgar-tool automates this process so you can download hundreds (or even thousands) of EDGAR documents with one command.

  • Consistent Financial Profiling: edgar-tool eases financial analysis by standardizing across different companies' reports. Companies often use custom tags or apply standard tags inconsistently which leads to variations that complicate direct comparisons. edgar-tool uses a custom table of XBRL tags to make cross-company financial comparison easier.

  • Customized RSS Feeds: EDGAR does not allow users to subscribe to a single RSS feed for multiple companies. edgar-tool's rss command allows you to filter EDGAR's broadest RSS feed by specific companies of interest and produce a CSV file similar to the one produced by edgar-tools text search functionality.

Cost

Level of difficulty

Requirements

edgar-tool requires the Python interpreter to download and use. It supports any currently maintained version of Python (Python >=3.9 as of this writing). Check the Programming Language section of edgar-tool's release page on PyPI for officially supported versions. When in doubt, use the latest stable Python version. You can download the latest version of the Python interpreter from www.python.org/downloads/.

Limitations

  • The tool is limited by the limitations of the SEC's EDGAR database itself, such as:

    • No historical data before 2001

    • Documents are raw corporate fillings - there are no summaries or analysis

    • Limited API options compared to other financial data sources

    • No private company data - only data for public companies and some regulated entities is available

Ethical Considerations

Users Bellingcat's edgar-tool must adhere to the following:

Guide

The most up-to-date guides on downloading & using edgar-tool are always available on the bellingcat/EDGAR GitHub site. The December 18th 2023 Bellingcat article, New Tools Dig Deeper Into Hard-to-Aggregate US Corporate Data by edgar-tool creator George Dyer, provides examples of using edgar-tool's text search and RSS feed functionality.

Tool provider

George Dyer (former Bellingcat Tech Fellow)

Advertising Trackers

Page maintainer

Bellingcat Volunteer Team/Unassigned

Last updated