EDGAReView

First he tackled the SEC and got his way. Now Carl Malamud has targeted the U.S. Justice Department, demanding that it stop using its vast storehouses of data as a profit center and give it, not sell it, to the public. “How can we be a nation of laws if the laws are locked up behind a cash register, stamped with an unwarranted copyright assertion and then shrink-wrapped in a license agreement, creating a private parcel from the public domain?” And just as Malamud pushed the SEC in the early 1990’s by putting the agency’s financial data online for free, he already has uploaded over 20-million court documents for public access. Read the rest of this entry »

We really enjoyed this Wall Street Journal article about words and phrases in financial reports that translate buyer beware. “Now that most regulatory filings are easily searchable on the Internet, through services such as EDGAR Online, investors can troll through them for telltale phrases,” explains the author, who offers these tips on what to look out for. Read the rest of this entry »

We always enjoy seeing ways our customers are using our XBRL-tagged data feeds to power their products. Here’s one called, OV Tool (the OV stands for Ownership View), which lets users dive deeper into a common stock portfolio to better understand the relative value of each company. Read the rest of this entry »

New EDGAReView subscribers sign up every day, and since many of you are encountering XBRL for the first time or have come here to learn more about interactive data, here’s a short list of resources to get you up to speed. See how XBRL transforms a financial document into an interactive database. Read the rest of this entry »

The XBRL International organization is evaluating the market potential and demand for a XBRL Certification Program for individuals, which strikes us as a good idea. Since XBRL is a standard tool for many financial reporting jobs, the certificate would be a plus for applicants. Read the rest of this entry »

Can you correctly match these Federal capital expenditures to what they cost taxpayers (in inflation-adjusted totals)?

Check your answers.

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EDGAR Online’s new investor relations product converts the XBRL documents companies are now required to post on their corporate sites into reader-friendly views – an important aid in shareholder communications. Read the rest of this entry »

Financial news media including The Wall Street Journal have recently been filled with articles about Twitter.com – a social media networking site in which people send 140-characters messages called tweets. If you haven’t tried it yet, you might be surprised at how it has become a tool for brand promotion, which can be used strategically by financial professionals. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s an irony that the focus for XBRL is finally turning to what its developers originally envisioned – they saw it as “a killer app” for all types of financial reporting, rather than as a Federal regulatory standard, which it became this year when the SEC mandated XBRL filing of company reports. Now, the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) has formed an XBRL Advisory Committee “to focus on the untapped market needs enabled by this emerging technology”. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you know you can control what comes up in Google searches on your name? That’s an important skill if you anticipate a prospective employer (or date) will be checking you out, or, like the new Chairman of GE, you’d rather be known more for your actual accomplishments than for your rattlesnake-killing techniques. Here’s how. Read the rest of this entry »