Like many others, I’ve often sought a straightforward method to access public company data from EDGAR in a table format for research or personal interest. The SEC provides a REST API endpoint for free access to this information. However, I found the technical aspects — like rate limits, necessary headers, and converting nested JSON into tables — daunting. I believe some of you might feel the same.
To help with this, I’ve created an Excel workbook that significantly streamlines the process of extracting public company data from SEC APIs into an easy-to-use table format:
Here how the data for one company may look like:
I need to denote that the data returned from the API is occasionally incomplete and often requires a lot of additional manual work to bring all the data into consistent format. But this is a free tool that can give you a great starting point in any analysis that involves public companies.
Please share this post with anyone who you think may find it useful:
Also, as a bonus, if you were ever trying to find a single list of all entities for a specific industry in the SEC company database, you can find this list on the respective tab in this file:
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