Lost in translation - the Honda and Nissan merger talks

Are the Japanese automakers Honda and Nissan planning to enter merger talks or were the news reports premature or misleading? It is frustratingly hard to decipher from finance news - what does it even mean planning to enter talks to discuss a merger.

Luckily it's really easy to see what the companies actually say in their SEC filings. And we need to look at the 6-K filings since Honda and Nissan are foreign entities. For American companies we would use look at the 8-K filings.

Here is how you would view the latest 6-K filing for Honda in edgartools.

Viewing the 6-K Filing

The code is very simple and easy to remember. Each line does something complicated like querying the SEC apis and fetching data, but that's something you don't have to worry about.

c = Company("HNDAF")
f = c.latest("6-K")
f.view()

This can even be simplified into a single line call

Company("HNDAF").latest("6-K").view()

Of course you should note that the latest() function is time sensitive so at the time of writing Honda's latest 6-K filing was dated December 18th 2024.

The most complicated operation is the view() call. This downloads the HTML filing, parses and renders the filing. I will follow up with a post dedicated to this since there is a loot of engineering that goes into rendering HTML in the console.

Conclusion

This post illustrates how you can easily get information released by a company using edgartools.

pip install edgartools

⭐️ Star it on GitHub: https://github.com/dgunning/edgartools