A Christmas present for business journalists: SEC doc iPad app

Dave Friedman, editor in chief of Wall St. Watchdog, reviews the new iPad application that allows people to read SEC filings and make notes of important disclosures, a great gift for any hardcore business journalist.

Friedman writes, “This app claims to have two purposes: (1) act as a central repository for all SEC filings in which an investor is interested, and (2) serve as a social media platform through which investors can opine about the content of these SEC filings.

“On the first point, the app succeeds brilliantly. Its navigation is intuitive, it is responsive, and it has an annotation feature that allows you to make notes as you review, say, Apple’s 8-K filing.

“Where this app fails is in the notion of social media. The app’s designer assumes that the people most inclined to read SEC filings are willing to publicly share their opinions and notes about the material that companies present about themselves in public filings. This assumption seems erroneous, if only for the reason that the people most likely to review SEC filings are those fundamental investors who think that a particular company’s stock has been mis-priced by the market. (The perfect example of this would be those fundamental analysts who dug into Enron’s financial statements and started asking questions.) These are the very people for whom this app would be most useful, yet, at the same time, they are also the same people who most closely guard their opinions and analyses about stocks, in order that their mis-pricing is not eliminated by the market.”

Read more here.