Quick easy access to 8-K filings

You've got skills in Python, and you work in quant finance. Or you are an investor - it doesn't matter that much. Let's put your interest in finance and investing together with a little python to find interesting and profitable information on companies.

Form 8-K filings, required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), serve as real-time windows into important corporate developments. These filings cover a wide range of events, from leadership changes to major business transformations, providing invaluable insights for investors, analysts, and researchers.

This article will guide you through the process of efficiently retrieving and analyzing 8-K filings using the powerful edgartools Python library. By the end of this guide, you'll be able to programmatically access, filter, view, and download these critical SEC documents with ease.

Prequisites

• Python 3.9 or higher installed on your system or Google Colab
• Basic knowledge of Python programming
• The edgartools library installed (you can install it using pip: pip install edgartools)

Getting started with edgartools

The edgartools library simplifies the process of working with SEC filings. Let's start by importing the necessary components and setting up our environment.

from edgartools import Company

This import gives us access to the Company class, which serves as our primary interface for retrieving SEC filings.

Retrieving 8-K Filings

Accessing the latest filings

To begin, we'll create a Company object for the company we're interested in. For this example, we'll use Apple Inc. (ticker: AAPL) and get the 5 most recent filings

c = Company("AAPL")

filings = c.latest("8-K", 5)

The most recent 8-K filing

Now we get the most recent filing using the same method but this time we don't specify a number. This literally gets you the latest.

f = c.latest()

Once you have a filling you now have access to what was filed by the company. Let's see if there is anything interesting in this.

There are a lot of powerful ways to see what's inside the filing, but one particularly powerful way is to view inside the filing. Simply you call filing.view()

This downloads the html for the main filing and allows you to view the filing in the terminal or notebook if you are using edgartools from a notebook.

Viewing exhibits

The main filing document may or may not be what you want. Companies often include additional documents called exhibits with the actual material information they are releasing in the 8-K filing. So let's look into the exhibits

filing.exhibits

filing.exhibits[1].view()

Conclusion

The edgartools library provides a powerful and user-friendly way to access, view, and analyze 8-K filings. By leveraging this tool, investors, researchers, and analysts can gain rapid insights into significant corporate events, potentially informing better decision-making and deeper understanding of company dynamics.

As you become more familiar with edgartools, you'll find it to be an invaluable asset in your financial analysis toolkit. Remember to always cross-reference the information from 8-K filings with other sources and consider the broader context of each filing.

If you want to go deeper check out analyzing company news with AI or using AI for investigations.