SEC Edgar, XBRL and Arelle

According to Investopedia:

Fundamental analysis relies on the use of financial ratios drawn from data on corporate financial statements to make inferences about a company's value and prospects

The SEC's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system (EDGAR) allows us to download current and historical corporate financial statements (i.e. - 10-K Annual and 10-Q Quarterly reports) in bulk from the SEC web site, greatly facilitating the activity of fundamental analysis.

Publicly-held companies submit financial statements to the SEC electronically using the industry standard eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) format, an XML-based markup language. Moreover, when we download these financial statements from the SEC web site using EDGAR, they are also provided to us in XBRL format.

Because of the complexities of financial reporting that it strives to accomodate, the XBRL format can be difficult to navigate for the novice. Fortunately, there are several software packages available that implement an XBRL parser. Arelle is an especially useful open-source package that can parse SEC filings out of the XBRL format, and also load these filings into a PostgreSQL relational database schema, if desired.

In this tutorial, we will show how to use SEC Edgar, XBRL and Arelle to automate the process of financial statement retrieval, which allows us to focus on the task of financial analysis.

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