Financial Data Backend

This month was all about research, understanding how the SEC works, how EDGAR serves filings, and how XBRL data is structured. The goal was to learn as much as possible about the system before building on top of it.

The first prototype was essentially a live parser of the SEC database. It could pull filings and display financial data, but with serious limitations: only the most recent filing, limited year coverage, and poor handling of the thousands of different XBRL tags companies use to report the same line items. Rough, but it proved the concept.