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SEC filings to uncover and track financial and economic indicators

ยท 3 min read

This post explores how SEC filings can be used to uncover and track financial and economic indicators. It showcases an open-source OpenBB app that visualizes this data, providing valuable insights for investment research and market trend analysis.

A few days ago, Justin Lokos shared a fascinating GitHub repository maintained by John Friedman that really caught my attention.

This repository analyzes SEC filings to uncover and track financial and economic indicators across a wide range of sectors.

It can be found here.

It processes topic mentions from regulatory filings and turns them into standardized, sector-level metrics that are updated daily - making it a powerful tool for identifying trends across the economy.

I found the data so compelling that I built and hosted an OpenBB app around it.


The app offers a wide range of indexes across key domains, including DEI and ESG in Governance; Tariffs and Supply Chain in Trade; Layoffs in Employment; Outsourcing and Supplier Concentration in Market Dynamics; Consumer Confidence in Consumer Sentiment; Space and Nuclear in Technology; Political Stability in International; IPO in Corporate Finance; Health Research, Health, and Pandemic in Health; various indexes in Resources such as Explosive Materials, Metals, Semiconductor Materials, Propellant Components, Raw Materials, Electronic Components, and Chemicals; and Military Equipment, Terrorism, and War in Military & Security

And then I made it available to everyone.

In fact, I shared this on LinkedIn and asked people interested on the app to comment and the post got close to 20k impressions.

My friend Caique does this often and has seen a lot of people asking for the apps from OpenBB.

And here's the template DM I sent to 100+ people interested.

Hey,


Sending you a message based on your comment in the post!


  1. Go to https://pro.openbb.co/ and make sure that you have an account - it's free.

  1. Then go to this link: https://pro.openbb.co/app?modal=connect-backend&name=Datamule%20Indicator&url=https://openbb-datamule-indicators.fly.dev

That should populate a new backend on OpenBB where:



  1. On the "Apps" tab, click on the "Financial and Economic Indicators" - that should open a dashboard with all the data in one place.

All the data should be ready to be interacted with OpenBB Copilot out-of-the-box.


If you have any questions ping me!


Also, if you want to see how I built this app - the full code is open source here: https://github.com/DidierRLopes/openbb-datamule-indicators.