Show HN: I made a free tool that analyzes SEC filings and posts detailed reports
85 comments
·April 13, 2025martinbaun
I was thinking of building exactly this type of thing here. This is great and I love the simple/minimalistic styled pages.
Things I was also contemplating to implement you can freely steal:
1. Giving a list of potential interesting investments - these could also be behind paywall.
2. Summarize based on sectors to see where there's downturns coming - again maybe paywall this
3. Connect with news-sites or twitter etc.. to see what is happening and what is the sentiment. This is a lot harder as you'll need to either scrape or pay to get that info.
Best of luck
GodelNumbering
Really nice of you to encourage, thank you! I've thought about some of those.
The first one is an interesting idea, but offering any real financial advice is regulated, which is a tread carefully territory
Second one is achievable and a good one at that. In fact, there is a lot of canonical data out there that when used carefully can provide a very nuanced picture of the current state of economy.
Third one, currently I have just a twitter account where the earnings reports are auto posted the second they are ready (that is, until I run out of free api limits). Their API cost for at the higher end makes it only viable if I am doing it full time and there was a clear edge by analyzing the data. My gut feeling is, most of the work will go into filtering out low signal posts idk
youainti
I'd suggest moving to either bluesky or rss. In fact, selling rss access (very fast responses) and delaying the public (twitter/Bluesky) releases by a few hours/days may be a way to monetize successfully.
martinbaun
Unpopular opinion here... If you tread carefully you'll most likely not succeed. I am not American and I know you guys like to sue eachother for putting cats in microwaves and stuff so maybe this is not great opinion to have in America at the current moment.
I would go for it and put a disclaimer, or I would just incorporate in a country where there's no issues with these things.
all this is hard of course to provide good value, but worthwhile.
Twitters' cost is insane right now, I had quite a few ideas for twitter integrations but they would easily cost thousands per month just to access their API.
I looked into https://github.com/d60/twikit - might not be suitable but you can definitely play around with it. Just don't use your official account as I got shadow banned using it unfortunately.
ameister14
>Unpopular opinion here... If you tread carefully you'll most likely not succeed. I am not American and I know you guys like to sue eachother for putting cats in microwaves and stuff so maybe this is not great opinion to have in America at the current moment.
It's not actually about personal suits, financial advice may fall into financial services regulations and that's regulated by the government of the US, EU, etc. so wherever the company is registered may have issues in addition to the potential of the regulations applying to the individual and not shielded by the company.
anshumankmr
Was figuring out how to do the same thing, but for an Indian context, and specific to one's portfolio, by perhaps reading emails. Was still ideating it, cause I am working on another thing at the moment.
NoToP
I'm interested in this topic too, but am approaching it from an auditing rather than from an investing angle.
alangibson
I read lots of quarterly report summaries. I like what you're doing here, but you need to be aware that AI summaries are already built into many existing platforms. So don't expect to be able to monetize this as it stands.
mpeg
And way before the current wave of LLMs, I did some consulting for a company that provided these kind of summaries over a decade ago, and I’m sure they weren’t that early themselves
skippyboxedhero
Yes, but:
1. These summaries were terrible. 2. The economics of these summaries was to get into Google News, spam newsfeeds, and use this to drive traffic to your paid product. This business model stopped working when Google News stopped accepting new sources for their Finance feed...because it was full of spam (I worked for a company that tried to start in this area with human writers, didn't work because they couldn't get onto Google).
Simply Wall St was one company that made tens of millions doing this, there were many others...but none were doing anything that is related to what OP is doing.
Every time someone will tell you something can't be done...this very clearly can work, it is not easy but ad revenue for financial services is still completely ludicrous and most services doing this are complete garbage (the news articles above the OP is producing are far from it, I worked in equity research, this is better than most journalism in the space...which is now non-existent...and probably at the level of a junior analyst).
saalweachter
When I was graduating college before the Great Recession, several of my recruiter pings were for companies wanting to parse financial documents.
If they were reaching out to not particularly special undergraduates twenty years ago, I'm guessing it goes back at least thirty.
kkaatii
Love it! This is a very useful tool to provide me with introductory (but granular enough) information about new investment ideas that I have.
Just two cents based on my usual workflow --
1. I like to compare companies within the same industry, so it would be good if i can ask follow up questions after reading a report like "How does company Y compare with company X on XX metrics?"
2. I understand that the reports are generated by a model; if that is true, maybe you could cross-reference the fillings with their corresponding earnings call transcripts (should be available for free on many investment websites) and highlight what is being discussed/asked in the calls as well
Again, thank you for the great work. Already pinned your site to my browser's investment workspace XD
GodelNumbering
Thanks, both are really good suggestions!
dchuk
Well done site. One important nit pick: never use charts that don’t start from 0 on the y axis. I was looking at a stock that had a yoy growth rate reduction of 6% (from 39 to 33 for each respective yoy period), and the chart showed an aggressive down to the right trend line because the y axis started at 33% instead of 0%.
Charts like that show more detail sure, but everyone freaks out in reaction to them. Always zero out your graphs.
montebicyclelo
> Always zero out your graphs
Great way to end up with useless graphs where you have a tiny line at the top that's been compressed to the point where you can't see any changes...
The "rule" about ensuring axes are zeroed is for bar charts not line graphs.
Etheryte
Charts like this are standard practice in finance. You're interested in the relative movement, not absolute numbers, so a chart that starts from zero is practically useless since the change you're trying to see is too small.
WheatMillington
I disagree with this. Zero is an arbitrary and often useless intersection. A stock worth $300 is going to show meaningless movements at that scale.
wisemang
This is correct. GP’s rule should be adhered to for bar charts though. Absolute values there are expected. For line charts continuous (ish) over time, people are usually more interested in relative change in a time period so ok if y axis starts closer to the minimum value of the series in that range.
ReaLNero
Yeah, I would say the y-axis range on charts should be set at "3-sigma likelihood of observation" thresholds. Not everything that's charted can be framed as sampling from a distribution, but the principle of manually setting chart ranges would nonetheless still apply.
For instance, if we're charting someone's body temperature, we would likely fix our y-axis to 80-110.
dchuk
That’s the exact point?
WheatMillington
No, it isn't. People are interested in whether a stock has volatility, and whether it has moved x%. If a $10 stock loses $1 it should show a roughly matching pattern to a $200 stock losing $20. Intersecting at zero will show a very large movement for the $10 stock and a very small movement in the $200 stock, despite the effect being the same to stockholders.
bufferoverflow
Zero is not arbitrary when it comes to the stock price.
Etheryte
It very much is, because stocks don't start at zero and your entry point will also not be zero. You can be deep in the red long before the stock gets anywhere close to zero. Even when a stock hits zero it doesn't always mean something useful, look at the Hertz bankruptcy for a good example. As far as stocks are concerned, zero is arbitrary and pretty universally a useless reference point.
farrellm23
Adding to this, stock prices should be plotted on a log scale since it is log returns that are roughly normal, and then 0 really makes no sense.
vincnetas
One child comments makes a better suggestion. Display only a change in % since period start. Who cares about the absolute price. You only care about percentage change.
And yes, all charts would automatically start from 0 as a side effect.
apeescape
Change could go to negative though, so even though 0% is included in the chart, the true possible bottom value of the chart is -100%.
miki123211
I wish you also offered company summaries, not just news.
Form 10-K is usually what you'd need to parse for those, maybe with recent stats taken from the 10-Q.
It'd be really great if one could get a report on a company in an industry they're unfamiliar with, with statistics like profit margin available at a glance, and a good description of how they actually operate, what is important to them, what areas of the business actually bring in the money (this is often surprising!) etc.
GodelNumbering
That's an interesting idea, thinking about it.
The plan is to address all SEC forms anyways so this will be a natural extension
solresol
It seems to be the season for scraping SEC filing archives and running them through AI bots to extract information. I made this:
https://boards.industrial-linguistics.com/
It only looks at information about directors on company boards, and unlike your much better project, I don't have any clear idea how to commercialise it.
vnjxk
It really seems like it is, I made this YouTube channel to do it as well
0wis
I love it ! Thanks for sharing here !
I have to build a project for data analysis with ML (and optionally AI) for a course and certification I am passing, this is a great inspiration. I will probably do something simpler on European stocks.
You say it was a year long effort, was it full time ? Do you have an estimation of how many hours you spent on it ? Did you do it alone ?
GodelNumbering
I lost track of the hours lol. Technically it is a side project but I have been putting all my spare time into it. I had some help too.
For European stocks, is there a common EU regulatory body where all filings are submitted? That would be a good start
bacon_fan123
would be interested to follow along! Where would you source the filings for european stocks?
Kon-Peki
It’s nice, I like it.
PS if the next question is whether I’d pay for it, the answer is likely no ;)
A suggestion: I forget the HTML tag off the top of my head, but there is something you can do that turns off the keyboard autocorrect. Setting the search box input type to something specific or something like that… stock tickers aren’t dictionary words :)
GodelNumbering
Thank you! I love this about HN (well, I've been a lurker mostly for 18 years) that people point to things you haven't even thought of.
notimetorelax
Looks great! For a long time I wished there was a historical analysis that would show quality of the management. Meaning, what initiatives did the management bet on in the past years and how well did it pan out? If a bet failed, was the management honest about it?
curiouscats
Interesting, good job.
Minor suggestion: I would make the home page feed show popular stocks (so that it is more interesting to new visitors and also engaging to regular visitors). You could just pick 100 stock symbols or combine that with something like what you are seeing people search for (I would manually check the popular search ones - some may not make sense to add to the home page feed).
turbocon
Seriously fantastic tool, I'm going to use the hell out of this, I appreciate you creating this so much! Let me know if there's a way to donate.
GodelNumbering
Much appreciated. The only donation I can think of is if you help spread the word. I learned a tough lesson this week that it is extraordinarily hard to market a product lol
P.S. If it wasn't for @dang putting it in the second-chance-pool, this post would have never been seen by more than 2 people.
johntopia
Great work you’ve done here. I worked on a similar project for about a year but ended up dropping it because it wasn’t fun for me. Mine failed — I hope yours succeeds. Best of luck!
(* within a few minutes of SEC filing)
Currently does it for 1000+ US companies and specifically earnings related filings. By US companies, I mean the ones that are obliged to file SEC filings.
This was the result of almost a year long effort and hundreds of prototypes :)
It currently auto-publishes for 1000 ish US companies by market cap, relies on 8-K filing as a trigger.
e.g. https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/NVDA will take you to NVDA earnings
Would be grateful to get some feedback. Especially if you follow a company, check its reports out. Thank you!
Some examples: https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/AAPL/apple-q1-eps-beats-desp...
https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/NVDA/nvidia-revenue-soars-ma...
https://www.signalbloom.ai/news/JPM/jpm-beats-estimates-on-c... (JPM earnings from Friday)
Hallucination note: https://www.signalbloom.ai/hallucination-benchmark