XBRL and Individual Investors
May 1st, 2008 by Nut
Here’s a neat little article on something I had never heard of until yesterday. Apparently, the SEC is going to announce (on May 14) how companies will have to report their financials in XBRL language. That means that all the data will be organized and labeled so that investors (or anyone, really) can organize, play with, and crunch every single bit of data that the company puts out.
Why is this so cool?
It’ll be streamed in real time and it’ll be free.
This is huge. People spend thousands of dollars on products like Investools to help them make decisions about investing and this new system promises to do that and maybe more, opening the doors to anyone who wants to do a little hardcore research. So you better brush up on your Excel abilities because this is going to blow up the whole analysis of financial statements for investors.
The sad part? It won’t be done anytime soon (not for all companies, anyway) and other parts of the world already have this in place. Why are we always behind when it comes to technology? It really aggravates me. But I think I like the stability here more than in, say, Korea.
The article focuses a lot on how this will prevent the next Enron from happening—not sure if that’s true or not but we’ll see.
Open an ING account and get a $25 bonus!
