
MarketBrief (YC S11) Makes Obtuse SEC Documents Human-Friendly - lyime
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/15/yc-funded-marketbrief-makes-obtuse-sec-documents-human-friendly/
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sgrove
This is one of those opportunities that seems blindingly obvious in hindsight
- the amount of data being pushed out daily is way beyond what any of us can
process, especially in the typical SEC language. Turning it into meaningful
(or at least, understandable) info changes the dynamic entirely - I can _skim_
a document now and know if it's worth finishing. And being able to pump high-
value, legible, auto-generated financial news across to other networks is an
opportunity that boggles the mind.

The mention of other sources (FDA, etc.) also makes a ton of sense I hadn't
thought of. I wonder if we'll see the day of mostly-generated news with humans
mainly being editors?

One question: the included screenshot has the sentence, "I've included a few
more notes from..." - is that auto-generated, or is that an editor's note?

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dirtae
I have been using SECWatch for awhile, and noticed that the email
notifications I've been getting have been pointing to MarketBrief for the last
few weeks. Didn't realize it was a YC company until now.

This is a product I have a personal need for, but I have to say that I'm
disappointed with MarketBrief so far. The auto-generated "human readable"
articles don't seem to provide much value. In fact, when I started to see
them, I assumed it was some kind of SEO strategy, not something that was
actually intended to be useful to me. I mean, why would I want to see a bunch
of numbers embedded in long-form prose template instead of a more easily
digestible table?

Even more seriously, a lot of the SEC filings on MarketBrief don't seem
complete. For example, I received an email notification today about this SEC
filing:

[http://marketbrief.com/pmic/8k/events-or-changes-between-
qua...](http://marketbrief.com/pmic/8k/events-or-changes-between-
quar/2011/8/15/8978944/filing)

The filing basically says that the company issued a press release, which is
supposed to be attached. But the attached press release is nowhere to be
found. If I go to the main SEC EDGAR website, the press release is easily
accessible:

[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1453820/0000950123110...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1453820/000095012311077548/c21511exv99w1.htm)

I'm excited about the problem being tackled here, so I'll look forward to
future improvements.

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snewe
An API for the raw data that underlies this system would be extremely useful
to academics. Databases like compustat and execucomp are expensive and lack
some of the most interesting details in SEC documents. I have worked on trying
to extract deep information in footnotes in financial statements (e.g. foreign
cash holdings and option exercise tax shields) and found even Turk/Crowdflower
couldn't handle the complexity. If they can figure out an algorithm to pull
out such data, they will have both a great academic and private sector
product.

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danteembermage
I was really excited that they'd figured out a way to cull balance sheet data
out of the filings. Doesn't appear so though, "XYZ Corp filed their annual
statement today, you can view it _here_ "

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secretasiandan
For historical data, this will be an issue.

Going forward, the SEC is requiring filers to make this process much easier

<http://xbrl.sec.gov/> <http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002.pdf>

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athst
I'd be interested to know how Google feels about automatically generating
content from other content like this - at first glance it looks like a regular
article, but after you read a few it's clear that they have some sort of
dynamic template for the content. More legit than a content farm I suppose,
but it's not necessarily high quality either.

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mshafrir
Thanks for checking out MarketBrief. We just launched our financial news
service, but we're constantly iterating on the quality and analysis of our
articles, and our sights are set much higher than simply churning content.

~~~
robertk
Ironically, when I started reading this I thought you were poking fun at the
generated language, because your post sounded like it to me.

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lambtron
seems like a great product for a pain that most people have. i don't seen
professional investment firms or bulge bracket banks would use this, however;
at citi we use factset and capiq and even those services don't reveal
everything and have errors sometimes. the analysts, at the end of the day,
usually goes through the filings no matter what.

like other comments posted here, professional investors, on the other hand,
generally already have another service they pay for, or proprietary
data/information (for hedge funds or prop shops at least) that aggregates the
specific data they are looking for.

not quite sure what the target audience of this is; if its investors with the
intention of condensing data to just q/q and y/y operational performance, then
the financial information technology space is already pretty crowded.

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BrentRitterbeck
We do a great job at locating resources. This has created a new problem: we
have too much information to wade through. I would now like to see some sort
of effort to structure this information. You make the comment that the
financial information technology space is already pretty crowded, but I still
haven't seen anything that structures all of this financial information
CHEAPLY.

EDIT: Hell, if I could assemble a team, I think the best way to attack this
problem would be to build out the same functionality that Bloomberg provides
for equities, provide it for free, and then build a retail brokerage firm
around it. Give people the information to make investment decisions easily,
and they will make those investment decisions. Just be there to capture the
revenue generated by their trades.

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lambtron
thats true; i have yet to see structured financial data for cheap. although
depending on the targeted audience, that 'structure' varies. equity analysts
might be concerned about operational performance, top line growth, margins,
and stock buyback programs. debt/credit analysts might be concerned about cash
flows, revolver draws, commercial paper programs, etc. there are many niche
markets and existing services out there may have already provided these
structures (albeit not cheaply and they may be proprietary if at a firm).

building a retail brokerage firm around structured market information i think
is harder than it sounds. unless the transaction costs for each trade reflect
the value-add of having a 'free' service structure financial data. currently,
transaction costs reflect the quality of investment reports prepared by
(usually) CFA investment professionals. i'm not sure if the free structured
investment information would yield a transaction fee material enough to
warrant a sustainable business model.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
I have thought about the targeted audience portion of your comment. That is
fully addressable through the use of templates. My daily work is in the
interest rate risk space for a bank. As part of keeping up on the space, I
read the financials of other banks. There are certain things I look for in
these financials. If there was a way to create a template that was
automatically populated with the information I am looking for, then that would
be an improvement over the method I currently use. With that said, I'm not a
computer scientist. My programming skills are limited to the more mathematical
side of finance. I don't know how difficult it would be to provide such a
thing given the challenges of parsing natural language.

As for the pay wrapper, I will admit that operating a brokerage firm at a
large enough scale and a low enough price to attract a significant portion of
the market share while somehow turning a profit would certainly be a
challenge; however, I am not ready to abandon this line of thinking yet.

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ekanes
This is great. Talk about finding a real need and solving it. Well done guys.
Do you or does anyone know of something similar for licensing agreements? The
ones we all sign without reading? That'd be great as well.

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donw
If they had an API, or a machine-readable format that contained only the data
from each SEC filing, I would be very interested.

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athst
the SEC already makes filing data available in machine readable format - it's
called XBRL. I don't think all companies are on it now, but there's a mandate
that will force all companies to eventually do it

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danteembermage
Not back to 1996 they don't (the first year of online SEC filings) which for
those of us interested in doing panel studies we'd love to have. You can
purchase it for ~$20,000 for a small institution, I'm not sure what an
individual license would run.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
It's a shame that one would have to pay such a large amount for such a data
set. Let's not forget that the SEC exists largely to protect investors.
Somehow, today's SEC framework/accounting rules seem to favor the filers of
financial information rather than the users of financial information. This is
a fundamental problem of the system today.

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rokhayakebe
If they are automatically generating all the articles on the site that is
quite impressive.

~~~
hristov
It is impressive but they definitely need some more work. The current top
story is about how somebody called "Gendell Jeffrey L Et Al" sold a bunch of
stock. The phrase "Gendell Jeffrey L Et Al" clearly refers to multiple people
but their website is treating it like the name of a single person.

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tshauck
I worked on a similar project while an undergrad at KU.
(<http://www.oread.ku.edu/2008/october/20/fraank.shtml>)

I like the idea, a lot. This seems to be well executed, but I wonder how much
of a future this thing has with XBRL becoming a requirement. In 5 to 7 years
there will be enough historical data tagged in XBRL for any analyst to perform
as financial analysis.

Also, on the website I can search 400,000+ companies, but there only seems to
be ~4900 filings on the dashboard. Doesn't add up to me.

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jjm
As an avid investor I must say it looks like a generic investor news site
(complete with ads). I'm sure the content is there but for my eyes It's a bit
confusing (wall of small tidbits?).

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sigil
A few years back I wrote a scraper for 13f and 13g filings. There was no
standard format requirement at the time (is there now?) so it was an 80/20
hack with the remaining 20% completed via Mechanical Turk. Not sure what
became of the project, but it seemed like there was a menupages-style
opportunity to monetize the cleaned up data. Glad someone actually went ahead
and did it!

To the MarketBrief guys: are you using anything cool (machine learning?) to
clean up historical data?

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kelly5
Nice!

Is there any logic that notices when a number in the filing that isn't
normally included in the summary is surprising, so should be included, or is
the summary template static?

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Gaussian
There's a ton of places that this can go. Just building on top of the
functionality they've already enabled, this could become quite powerful very
quickly.

Here's this raw data stream that's existed for years that hasn't seen any good
tandems of algorithms+UI applied toward it. Big opportunity.

Watch Bloomberg, Reuters and Yahoo...they could be jousting for this in six
months or less.

~~~
dereg
Bloomberg and Reuters already have competing services that cost tens of
thousands of dollars each year for a subscription. If they bought this, it'd
be to eliminate a competitor.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
I hope that a competitor hangs around long enough to revolutionize this
industry. The system does not serve retail investors well at the moment. This
is a space with low hanging fruit.

~~~
dereg
Sorry for such a late reply, but I agree in full. I really loathe using the
Bloomberg Terminal, and I can't believe it hasn't been done better yet. I'm
hoping someone recognizes that low-hanging fruit.

~~~
BrentRitterbeck
I don't particularly have a problem with the Bloomberg Terminal; it's the
price with which I have a problem. There is no other source currently
available that provides the same information density as Bloomberg. The
navigation within a terminal at first is a little complicated, but that is
because the quantity of information you are dealing with is amazing. With that
said, I would be interested in reading your thoughts on what could be
improved.

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jhowell
I first saw this post on my mobile and didn't click on the story link. Taking
a look at the site, I was expecting something really user friendly, with big
letters and numbers with explanations alongside. Perhaps the mint.com of
public finance. To me, this site still looks like market watch or bloomberg or
any other finance site.

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jwcooper
My first thought on seeing their site is that the search box, and email alert
box look just like sidebar ads for some reason. I think it's because it looks
like an image, and not an html form.

I wouldn't have used the search if I had visited from Google Finance.

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mille562
I worked for a company in 2000 that was working on a very similar concept (if
not exact) called Newsgrade. I liked the idea then and I like the idea now. I
hope they are successful.

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jongraehl
fool.com has been generating this type of templated natural language
"analysis" of stocks for a while.

I expect most of the benefit to an expert would be in the comprehension of
public documents into some standard, structured from, and not the cute
(perhaps helpful to laymen) English presentation.

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puredemo
Now this, is a great concept. Congrats on having the best idea I've seen so
far this year guy.

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ScottBurson
Sigh. Nobody knows what "obtuse" means anymore.

~~~
Semiapies
Hate to spoil a good melodramatic sigh of intellectual superiority, but
"difficult to understand" is an accepted secondary definition of "obtuse" in
many dictionaries.

~~~
ScottBurson
[citation needed]

~~~
Semiapies
That's cute, since it was your unsubstantiated assertion in the first place
that the word was being misused.

Tip: when unsure about the definition of a word, try googling _define_ and the
word in question. You will get results from a number of sources.

~~~
ScottBurson
I did look it up, even before posting the first time.

I see that Google does list the definition you suggest. But it does so without
attribution, as far as I can see. Dictionary.com (the place I had been
looking), which takes definitions from several dictionaries, with attribution,
does not offer the meaning in question.

You said "many dictionaries" would list this meaning. I think your claim
remains unsubstantiated.

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ScottBurson
Clarification: the Google page for "obtuse" does list a source for the meaning
"hard to understand", but not only is that source not a dictionary, it offers
the meaning only to say that using the word with that meaning "is not
considered good style".

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rorrr
So who is the target audience? Finance pros can already read SEC filings.

SEO is the only obvious source of traffic and money I can think of.

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patio11
Make a team of finance analysts who _all_ cost $200+ an hour 10% more
efficient. Collect money hats.

Seriously, this is like "Bug tracking? You've got high priced professionals,
why can't they just use Excel or sticky notes?"

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dctoedt
I'm only a single data point, but I'd rather see data like this in a non-prose
format, preferably in tables -- the way SEC documents are served up from
EDGAR.

