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I had Downside's Deathwatch, a simple automated cash flow analysis.[1] It's still up, frozen in time. All those "Chart is not available for this symbol" entries are dead.

In the first dot-com boom, many companies went public before profitability. So anyone could see how much cash they had and how fast they were burning through it. I just calculated how much time they had left until cash went to zero. That's the "death date" listed. It was embarrassingly accurate.

[1] http://www.downside.com/deathwatch.html




This is awesome ( i mean, there is beauty in the simplicity of it)

Any thoughts to share the code which you used to analyse edgar? :)


It's no longer useful. The SEC used to require an EX-27 schedule in SGML with useful data. They discontinued that around 2001. Years later, they started requiring that data in XBRL format, which is more detailed. You could do this today with XBRL tools, which are available.

Downside was written in Perl, in 1999. There's a system in there to parse financial statements written in HTML for humans, but it's for HTML 3.1 and was never updated.

I used to get hate mail from CFOs over this.


Well, if you have the code and an example file it would still be usefull ( as reference ). Thanks for the information!


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