Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) EDGAR database. EDGAR contains regulatory filings from publicly-traded US corporations including their annual and quarterly reports:

All companies, foreign and domestic, are required to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms electronically through EDGAR. Anyone can access and download this information for free. [from the SEC website]

Human Interface

See http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html

Bulk Data

~~EDGAR provides bulk access via FTP: ftp://ftp.sec.gov/ - [official documentation][ftp-doc]. We summarize here the main points.~~

Each company in EDGAR gets an identifier known as the CIK which is a 10 digit number. You can find the CIK by searching EDGAR using a name of stock market ticker.

For example, searching for IBM by ticker shows us that the the CIK is 0000051143.

Note that leading zeroes are often omitted ~~(e.g. in the ftp access)~~ so this would become 51143.

Next each submission receives an 'Accession Number' (acc-no). For example, IBM's quarterly financial filing (form 10-Q) in October 2013 had accession number: 0000051143-13-000007.

HTTPS File Paths

Given a company with CIK (company ID) XXX (omitting leading zeroes) and document accession number YYY (acc-no on search results) the path would be:

File paths are of the form:

/edgar/data/XXX/YYY.txt

For example, for the IBM data above it would be:

~~ftp://ftp.sec.gov/edgar/data/51143/0000051143-13-000007.txt~~ https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/0000051143-13-000007.txt

EDGAR has retired HTTP services. Instead use the HTTPS equivalent.

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/0000051143-13-000007.txt

Note, if you are looking for a nice HTML version you can find it at in the Archives section with a similar URL (just add -index.html):

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/51143/000005114313000007/0000051143-13-000007-index.htm

Indices

If you want to get a list of all filings you'll want to grab an Index. As the help page explains:

The EDGAR indices are a helpful resource for HTTPS retrieval, listing the following information for each filing: Company Name, Form Type, CIK, Date Filed, and File Name (including folder path).

Four types of indexes are available:

company — sorted by company name

form — sorted by form type

master — sorted by CIK number

XBRL — list of submissions containing XBRL financial files, sorted by CIK number; these include Voluntary Filer Program submissions

URLs are like:

~~ftp://ftp.sec.gov/edgar/full-index/2008/QTR4/master.gz~~ https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/full-index/2008/QTR4/master.gz

That is, they have the following general form:

~~ftp://ftp.sec.gov/edgar/full-index/`{YYYY}`/QTR`{1-4}`/`{index-name}`.[gz|zip]~~
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/full-index/`{YYYY}`/QTR`{1-4}`/`{index-name}`.[gz|zip]

So for XBRL in the 3rd quarter of 2010 we'd do:

~~ftp://ftp.sec.gov/edgar/full-index/2010/QTR3/xbrl.gz~~ https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/full-index/2010/QTR3/xbrl.gz

~~[ftp-doc]: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/ftpusers.htm~~

CIK lists and lookup

There's a full list of all companies along with their CIK code here: http://www.sec.gov/edgar/NYU/cik.coleft.c

If you want to look up a CIK or company by its ticker you can do the following query against the normal search system:

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?CIK=ibm&Find=Search&owner=exclude&action=getcompany&output=atom

Then parse the atom to grab the CIK. (If you prefer HTML output just omit output=atom).

There is also a full-text company name to CIK lookup here:

http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/cik.htmL

(Note this does a POST to a 'text' API at http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/cik.pl.c)

Parsing XBRL Data

See scripts and README file there.

References

CorpWatch have an excellent API and DB dump covering a lot of EDGAR info - see the CorpWatch DataHub Entry

Edgar

Install / Use

README