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How healthy is your bank? Try the Texas Ratio and find out.
With 123 bank failures this year and more to come, you may be wondering about your own bank. Try the Texas Ratio for a quick snapshot of how healthy it is. Just take your bank’s most recent report and divide the bad stuff on the books by the good stuff. Let’s hope the ratio is [...]

Quick Quiz: Which CEOs earn “Highest Paid Worst Performers” title?
The Corporate Library, a corporate governance research firm based in Portland, Maine, reviewed SEC filings from 2,000 publicly traded companies and came up with a list of five chief executives they’re calling the “Highest Paid Worst Performers” of 2008. Match the CEO with the correct company. CEO Company 1. Michael Jeffries A. International Paper 2. James W. [...]

Showing off what you can do in Excel – with the fastest bank data available
We asked our Senior Analyst “EJ”, Elias-John Kies, to do a little showing off for our many subscribers who live inside Excel, and are looking closely at banks. His analysis, updated within seconds of the banks’ disclosures, is just one example of what you can accomplish when your worksheet is directly connected to SEC data, [...]

Now available – the Official XBRL for Dummies
The official XBRL for Dummies book is now available in printed form as well as an e- version for reading on Kindle. Co-Authored by Charles Hoffman and Liv Watson, the first chapter gives an excellent, comprehensive explanation of XBRL, and the fourth chapter leads you through a primer. Both business and technical readers will get [...]

New IR Solution renders XBRL reports on corporate websites into clear English with interactive views
The SEC requires companies to post the same Annual and Quarterly reports on their corporate websites as they file with the SEC. But the newly required XBRL-formatted documents were designed for computers to read, not humans, and these documents can be confusing for viewers. EDGAR Online’s new XBRL IR Solution solves that issue by rendering [...]

Justice Department pressured to open its vast database to The People
First he tackled the SEC and got his way. Now Carl Malamud has targeted the U.S. Justice Department, demanding that it stop using its vast storehouses of data as a profit center and give it, not sell it, to the public. “How can we be a nation of laws if the laws are locked up [...]

Telltale phrases in financial reports and how to find them
We really enjoyed this Wall Street Journal article about words and phrases in financial reports that translate buyer beware. “Now that most regulatory filings are easily searchable on the Internet, through services such as EDGAR Online, investors can troll through them for telltale phrases,” explains the author, who offers these tips on what to look [...]

Customer Spotlight: Analytical tool dives into common stock portfolios to weigh each company
We always enjoy seeing ways our customers are using our XBRL-tagged data feeds to power their products. Here’s one called, OV Tool (the OV stands for Ownership View), which lets users dive deeper into a common stock portfolio to better understand the relative value of each company. Here’s how the OV Metrics president, Miles Jennings, Jr., [...]

Where to learn more about XBRL
New EDGAReView subscribers sign up every day, and since many of you are encountering XBRL for the first time or have come here to learn more about interactive data, here’s a short list of resources to get you up to speed. See how XBRL transforms a financial document into an interactive database. A portion of this [...]

Should there be an XBRL professional certification?
The XBRL International organization is evaluating the market potential and demand for a XBRL Certification Program for individuals, which strikes us as a good idea. Since XBRL is a standard tool for many financial reporting jobs, the certificate would be a plus for applicants. Similar certificates exist in the financial, auditing and information technology communities, [...]