A tool for attorneys, accountants, executives, investors, researchers and others involved with U.S. securities disclosure, regulation and compliance.
Poe is a Windows 10/11 application for efficiently finding and tracking filers and filings under the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis and Retrieval) system and for filtering, reviewing, organizing and sharing these filings. It also offers quick access to frequently consulted laws, regulations and forms.
I am a securities, transactional, governance and disclosure attorney with nearly thirty years of large law firm and in-house public company experience (NYSE, NASDAQ and OTC) and a lifelong interest in software development ─ or “programming” as it was back in the day of BASIC, Pascal and FORTRAN.
When I began practicing law in the 1990s, the EDGAR system had just gone online. Although the early version was rudimentary by today’s standards, it was nonetheless a significant step forward for disclosure compliance, and it demonstrated the SEC’s understanding of the evolving digital age.
Despite improvements during the subsequent years, EDGAR remained inefficient to use (as it remains today). Finding that one Item 5.02 8-K from a few years ago can be a slog. Tracking down all of the Section 16 filings for a director is tedious. Digging up XBRL data requires more clicks than it should.
In the 2000s, I realized that I could make my job much easier by creating my own software to interact with EDGAR more efficiently. The result (proto-Poe) worked well for me, but it did not include many typical software interface elements and would have been baffling to any other user. It was all messy web scraping. As EDGAR evolved, I made changes to my software to meet my needs, but it still lacked polish.
I recently decided that I wanted to extend what Poe could do for me, especially to take advantage of the SEC’s efforts to make available much more structured data. I also realized that I could simultaneously transform Poe into something that could be useful to anyone who regularly needs EDGAR data or securities and disclosure laws, regulations and forms. The result is the version of Poe available through this site. You can download Poe here.
