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Comment by Harkins | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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

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.

EDGAR does not only contain public company filings.

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