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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Well, for one, it's 34 years old and is simple enough for non-technical people to use but robust enough for institutional use. For another, it's scaled to accommodate 3 decades of exponential growth in public filings and regulation. Did I mention it's 34 years old?

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I'm not sure about exponential growth in public filings (and EDGAR does not track regulation, so it's not relevant). For example, the number of publicly traded companies is down about 70% compared to twenty years ago: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DDOM01USA644NWDB

Could you share a link showing exponential increase in the use of EDGAR?

While there may be fewer companies, are there also fewer stock transactions, etc? This system tracks a lot of different types of transactions involving public companies.

Sure. Although you should be aware that not only public companies are required to make filings with the SEC.

Index - Q1 1994 - 3mb - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/full-index/1994/QTR1/form...

Index - Q1 2017 - 45mb - https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/full-index/2017/QTR1/form...

File sizes are also increasing because filers are adding structured data[1] to their SEC filings. Also, most SEC Filings are now verbose HTML files instead of plain-text files.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/structureddata/what-is-structured-data

And not really exponential. Something interesting happened 2003-2004 though. We can perhaps observe lead up to dot-bomb (1996-1999 growth) and the 2008 financial crisis.

http://hpics.li/2e78909

    1994,3153191
    1995,4813587
    1996,7539137
    1997,13755958
    1998,16107028
    1999,15935643
    2000,17548021
    2001,16873202
    2002,18904001
    2003,27723307
    2004,47116841
    2005,47982675
    2006,50672891
    2007,51322342
    2008,49635521
    2009,45312542
    2010,45384720
    2011,46455461
    2012,46733150
    2013,45842099
    2014,47065954
    2015,48112988
    2016,46636963
    2017,47037415

Nice breakdown! The SEC introduced some new filing requirements[1] in 2003 and 2004 that may have contributed to this.

[1] https://www.sec.gov/info/edgar/regoverview.htm

It's an index - a '\n'-delimited list of strings indicating the locations of filings. The size of those filings has nothing to do with the size of the index.

EDGAR does not only contain public company filings.

Additional regulation increases the number of filings that must be made.

EDGAR is admirable in many ways, but it's age is really showing, especially from a UI and UX perspective. I really wish the government would spend some effort in modernizing that aspect of it. BamSEC.com charges $35/month for essentially just a prettier UI, and it's so much more pleasant to use. Honestly, it's a pity the government never does M&A -- they should just buy BamSEC.

The public filings themselves are also a nightmare of hard to follow formatting.

Thanks for mentioning BamSEC.com. It looks way easier to use, even if it is a paid service.

Try out Last10K.com for SEC Filings. Admittedly it's not as "pretty" but it's free and includes some unique features including sentiment analysis.

Disclosure: Last10K.com is a side project of mine

Probably the product of (1) multiple changes in "best practices" data formats over 30 years (XML seems to be the format de jure), (2) optimizing for the filer and (3) diversity of filing data. Agreed it would be ideal if they were all similarly structured, but they have another set of stakeholders on whom they are imposing essentially a tax -- the filers themselves -- who have a legitimate gripe any time the SEC imposes a switching cost. It's easy to dismiss those gripes, but the vast majority of these filers aren't GOOG-sized. Many are very small, and those costs can be non-trivial to them.

Edit: Worth mentioning here that EDGAR's ease of use makes sites like BamSEC simple to create. Probably EDGAR's time is best spent focusing on the institutional intermediary. That allows competition to iterate on the best UX/UI for browsing these filings without imposing the cost on the filers themselves as discussed above.

> EDGAR is admirable in many ways, but it's age is really showing, especially from a UI and UX perspective

I like the bare-to-the-bones simplicity. In contrast to "better designed" portals of some other countries, I can usually point even the most technically-illiterate executive to the filing portal and expect to get something useful out the other end.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. Please consult a securities lawyer before preparing and/or filing anything with the SEC.

I love EDGAR. I use it daily, and agree with the benefits of simplicity in its UX/UI. It loads quickly and you can get the info you need in seconds if you know where to look.

It's almost as if you are unaware of the website you are posting this comment on.

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