This reminds me of Footnoted*, [1] a site that surfaces useful info that companies hide in footnotes, bury on a Friday afternoon dump, etc. I think there's a weekly newsletter that comes out after the Friday news dump has been picked through.
Or to write the press releases published along side SEC filings.
Notbsure why that actually helps, the SEC filongs are public... Justvanother case of the public and media not giving a damn about primary sources anymore.
Edit: From the article:
>> “We find it surprising this behavior is so effective,” Watkins said. “Investors should not assume press releases cover all events happening at a company at a given time.”
Apparently I am not the only one who is puzzled by thale fact the press releases actually seem to work...
I have used it for that very use case while analyzing the terms and conditions of some documents before signing. I still read them all myself as well, because I do not trust the current state of GPT to not miss anything important. But it helped me get a basic understanding and overview before I started my own analysis.
I've had this thought before -- that there's lots of good ideas and insights hidden in the deluge of comments on hn, reddit etc -- and GPT might be used to find them. But I haven't figured out a good prompt yet.
The first link is the regular site, which is what I’ve looked at before. For me, much of the value is just in the headline, which flags the issue so I can investigate further if it sounds interesting.
You jest, but they actually could be. One scenario would be for insiders to trade on the information after they released it publicly. So the temporary obfuscation might give them time to trade before the news had time to affect the stock.
Companies astroturffing bad news is the rule on every aspect of their business, not just sec fillings. An example: down here in Brazil, and pretty much in all of Latin America, CocaCola changed their formula on the classic Coke, reducing the ammount of sugar and mixing it with artificial sweeteners. They started rolling out this change mid 2021, and for someone that absolutely hates the after taste of artificial sweeteners like me, it was an obvious change. I haven't had a Coke since, to me it's dead. But anyways, if you try to find any mention about the change in the formulation of CocaCola on the brazilian version of Google, you only find articles about the new "Zero Sugar Coke" formula, and no news AT ALL about the change to the original Coke. Even in Facebook and Twitter, any search for "coke changed formula" always retrieves posts about the new formula of Coke Zero on the first results. These companies have gaslighting departments, that's part of being a corporation in 2023.
Interestingly, I noticed Amazon's CEO of Retail, Doug Herrington, dumping sizable amounts of Amazon stock[1].
This activity is coupled with growing complaints about Amazon's quality of goods[2], delivery[3][6] and ability to return those goods[2][4][5][8][9]. Amazon is now requiring customers to file a police report in order for their credible return to be accepted[7][10][11]. Amazon is also canceling union-backed delivery contracts[12], choosing instead to offer customers $10 to pick up their packages[13].
Oh, and tons of people are reportedly canceling Prime memberships[14].
Should we consider this salient signal of a downturn for Amazon?
Before you think about making something that quickly reads 8-K filings and acts upon it: don’t bother. A bunch of entities are already doing this way faster than you ever can through various methods and by the time you get the data the opportunity to act is gone.
I believe the current SOTA is to submit trades in the order of 10ms after the document is available online. In that time they downloaded the file, ran sentiment analysis on it and ran the numbers, decided which way to go and sent the trades to the market.
It's worth every penny to be first, but unless you have a lot of pennies, you won't be first.
Nasdaq closing auction ends at 4pm. Reports come out later. Participants trading on 8-K cannot trade the news immediately. Orders can be executed only on Monday during opening auction. Also, you assume their trades are enough to move the market and neutralize the opportunity, which may not be the case. Perhaps they can trade off market. I’m just saying that it may not be a done deal as you describe it, but I may be missing some aspects.
Despite being a Boglehead (total-market index investor), who thinks that's the best tablescraps I can get, when I can't be in the club of the people who're making the real money from the systems...
I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.).
Then I realize I was considering actively profiting off the misery of other retail investors, and decide to just stick to my index funds.
SEC’s EDGAR database has the filings available to everyone the moment they’re released. It will take you 5-10x longer to press F5 than it takes a bank/hedge fund to have a bot ingest the news and trade off of the new information. Even if you could ingest the information instantly, your orders will be slower than the people who are co-located within the same data center as the exchange, or the folks who set up private microwave relay networks between Chicago and NYC.
There are over 30 different types[1] of 8Ks and receiving notifications on all of them will inundate your inbox. It's a shameless plug but my freemium 'lay-person investor' site[2] will allow you to filter and select which 8Ks to view and receive notifications on. For example, you can receive an email every time a company files an event about a Bankruptcy / Receivership: https://last10k.com/stock-screeners/bankruptcy-receivership
OpenAI is going to make a difference here. These filings are often challenging to read for a lay man. However, ChatGPT should be able to have a decent go at mood analysis. Until companies start rewriting their articles to be OpenAI "proof"
Actually, those SEC filings are not that jard to read. I had a collegue who used ChatGPT to summarize those for him. Since even SEC filings contain letters to shareholders, all they got was a ChatGPT version of that, missing all the relevant and important stuff about risks and such. Also, what is not written in those filings is at at least as important as what is written, ChatGPT utterly fails here.
there are already several companies that offer machine readable digests. Not sure you want an LLM to do this b/c the risk of it hallucinating is terrifying.
All 8-Ks are available to the public on the SEC's EDGAR wesbite. As far as I know, 8-Ks are posted there on the day of filing. That could be wrong and there may be a quicker way to get them.
All politicians and companies do this type of thing. Here's [1] a particularly egregious example from 9/11, where a UK government advisor sent out a memo at advising "It's now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury".
Judging from the tone, the writer was elated. She sent the email shortly after the second plane hit.
The Commonwealth (Australia | UK at least) terminology of recent years is to call this Throwing a dead cat on the table a technique perfected by some Australian|New Zealand marketing consultants that turned to politics and advised both the AU and UK Governments.
Boris Johnson (former UK PM) perfected the technique .. no matter how bad an actual real news worthy political event might be .. no paper pays attention if you announce something totally bonkers and ridiculous at the same time.
Good Grief! Did you see that!! He threw a dead cat on the table!!!
Readit News
EDIT: found the newsletter [2]
1: https://www.footnoted.com/
2: http://fnd.footnoted.com
Notbsure why that actually helps, the SEC filongs are public... Justvanother case of the public and media not giving a damn about primary sources anymore.
Edit: From the article:
>> “We find it surprising this behavior is so effective,” Watkins said. “Investors should not assume press releases cover all events happening at a company at a given time.”
Apparently I am not the only one who is puzzled by thale fact the press releases actually seem to work...
The few articles you can see are interesting though.
Deleted Comment
You jest, but they actually could be. One scenario would be for insiders to trade on the information after they released it publicly. So the temporary obfuscation might give them time to trade before the news had time to affect the stock.
also available as an RSS/Atom format feed: https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcurrent&C...
There is also a paid-for service called PDS (https://www.sec.gov/oit/announcement/public-dissemination-se...) which isn't necessarily any faster but can be more reliable.
Interestingly, I noticed Amazon's CEO of Retail, Doug Herrington, dumping sizable amounts of Amazon stock[1].
This activity is coupled with growing complaints about Amazon's quality of goods[2], delivery[3][6] and ability to return those goods[2][4][5][8][9]. Amazon is now requiring customers to file a police report in order for their credible return to be accepted[7][10][11]. Amazon is also canceling union-backed delivery contracts[12], choosing instead to offer customers $10 to pick up their packages[13].
Oh, and tons of people are reportedly canceling Prime memberships[14].
Should we consider this salient signal of a downturn for Amazon?
[1]https://www.benzinga.com/sec/insider-trades/search/index?com.... [2]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13cieyc/receiv... [3]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13cjvq7/update... [4]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13c1hei/the_er... [5]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13cbd31/return... [6]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13calra/thats_... [7]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/xiaiqe/amazon_... [8]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/13avfyg/amazon... [9]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/1338hzs/amazon... [10]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/comments/y457gw/amazon_... [11]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/search/?q=police+report... [12]https://www.reddit.com/r/AmazonDSPDrivers/comments/136jfe9/a... [13]https://www.reddit.com/r/technews/comments/13cmrh8/amazon_of... [14]https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonprime/search/?q=cancel+prime&...
It's worth every penny to be first, but unless you have a lot of pennies, you won't be first.
I have idly wondered whether there's an viable opportunity to exploit retail investors who're being manipulated/misled (by, e.g., MSM financial 'news', stock-picker personalities, bloggers, WSB, etc.).
Then I realize I was considering actively profiting off the misery of other retail investors, and decide to just stick to my index funds.
[1] https://www.sec.gov/answers/form8k.htm
[2] https://last10k.com
Judging from the tone, the writer was elated. She sent the email shortly after the second plane hit.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/oct/09/uk.past
Boris Johnson (former UK PM) perfected the technique .. no matter how bad an actual real news worthy political event might be .. no paper pays attention if you announce something totally bonkers and ridiculous at the same time.
Good Grief! Did you see that!! He threw a dead cat on the table!!!
Deleted Comment