Reading XBRL Data from the SEC FTP SITE

Question

After I ftp into the SEC Edgar site (ftp.sec.gov) I am able to pull the appropriate financial statements (i.e., 10-k, 10-q, 8-k, etc.) onto my local computer. However, when I go to open these files, I can't seem to make much sense of them. There are large parts of the files which look like garbage. These parts usually occur after the following tag: begin 644 Financial_Report.xls. This looks like it corresponds to the an excel file that for some reason is then embedded into the xbrl.

Am I grabbing the right files and am I looking at them correctly?

As an example, one of the 8-k's that I grabbed was the following (you can paste this into a browser) and if you go halfway down, there's quite a bit of garbage there.

ftp://ftp.sec.gov/edgar/data/1112412/0001193125-13-028328.txt

Thanks! BK

Answer 1

There is a promising-looking R package to read XBRL data which I have yet to try myself. But it looks like it does the legwork for you.

Answer 2

You are looking at the wrong place. For your particular example, check this link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1112412/000119312513028328/0001193125-13-028328-index.htm

You can see that the link that you gave us is the complete submission text file, which is not XBRL. The XBRL files are the 6 files at the bottom of the link I gave you.

Alternatively you should check the bottom of this link: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1112412/000119312513028328/

Hope this helps.

P.S. You should check www.finviews.com, we have already done all the work. We can provide all the XBRL reports directly into Excel, and as soon as a company files its reports (10Q, 10K etc..) with the SEC, it takes us less than 2 minutes to have all the data (main statements to start with) in Excel as the company published, so you can do your financial modelling afterwards.