The joys of Edgar full text search

In November of last year, I blogged about the benefits of being able to do a full text search of all filings with the US SEC. Paul Kedrosky’s infectious greed blog describes some innovative ways of using this feature that I had not thought of at all. Kedrosky says: “I have an ‘interesting word’ search that scans SEC filings and feeds ’em back to me. Out this one popped, much to my childish glee.”

In the filing that Kedrosky refers to, the “interesting word” is followed by the following sentence: “Mr. Chapman then forcefully informed Mr. Shahbazian that it was inappropriate and inadvisable for the Chief Financial Officer of a public company to utter such blasphemy to the advisor of a 9.3% ownership stakeholder in the Issuer.”. This leads Kedrovsky to propose “the 11th Commandment: Thou shalt not blaspheme >9% shareholders.” It also leads to an interesting comment on Kedrosky’s blog: “And nothing so clearly reveals the inner mind of the [venture capitalist]... Blasphemy is restricted to saying bad things about God ... We all know that most VCs view themselves as quasi-divine beings ... But it is invaluable to actually hear a VC claim godlike status publicly. One can only assume the word hubris will mean something to Chapman one day. ”

Posted at 1:58 pm IST on Wed, 21 Mar 2007         permanent link

Categories: accounting, technology

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