Five ways biz reporters can find news from the SEC

Bill Hankes of Sqoop, the service used by business journalists to help them find news in public records, writes about five ways that reporters can find news from the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Here’s one:

2. Find hidden gems with full-text search

Similarly, the SEC provides a far more robust full-text search than EDGAR offers. Not only does the full-text search include the SEC filings, but also exhibits.

Why is this useful? There are many cases where one company may not have a duty to disclose information, but another party to the transaction does. One example is Airbnb, which is a very large, privately held company. When it raised money, it did not issue a Form D, so journalists really have no way of discovering this news.

However, mutual funds and other investment companies have a duty to disclose. So a search for Airbnb shows every filing or exhibit where Airbnb is mentioned. In some cases it is simply referenced as an example of a company in the on-demand economy, so finding the meat takes a little digging. But, here you can see that the Hartford Mutual Funds invested more than $900,000, and that Morgan Stanley purchased shares in April 2014 with a current value of $109 million. So, with some work, reporters can estimate the size of an undisclosed round this way.

Similarly, there have been other cases where companies have been acquired other businesses for “undisclosed” amounts, only to have those figures later disclosed in xbrl exhibits by the acquiring party, including this acquisition of Seattle-based Interepid Learning for $28 million in cash by Xerox. Earlier news accounts cited the amount as, “undisclosed .”

Read the others here.