AskEdgar Opens SEC Filing Data API to Retail Traders
AskEdgar published an article describing its API that converts SEC filings into structured data on dilution, shelf registrations, cash runway and underwriting agreements. The company says the API is used by $1B+ funds and is now available to retail traders.
Original post · 6 min read
Dilution ratings across 2,000+ tickers. Active shelf registrations. Cash runway calculations. Bank agreements with ROFR and tail financing clauses. Pump-and-dump risk scores.
The kind of data you'd normally pay $50K+ a year to access, and for some of these fields, data that literally doesn't exist on Bloomberg or any other institutional provider.
Our API is already being used by $1B+ funds, prop desks and investment banks.
And as of today, it's open to retail for the first time.
Here's how we got here, and what you can build with it.
I — Why This Data Doesn't Exist Anywhere Else
Most traders assume that if something matters, Bloomberg has it.
For large-cap equities, that's mostly true.
For small-caps, the space where 90% of retail trading pain comes from dilution, offerings, and pump-and-dumps, the institutional data providers fall apart.
Here's what they're missing:
Float that actually reflects reality. When a company converts debt to shares, the float changes overnight. Most providers don't update for months. We tack it on within 24 hours of the filing. That one field alone influences shelf capacity, offering ability, and downstream dilution risk, and no one else is doing it right.
Right of first refusal and tail financing. When you see H.C. Wainwright underwrite a small-cap offering, there's usually a contract locking the company into them for the next 12–24 months, with tail fees that keep the relationship sticky even if the company switches banks. This data sits inside exhibit agreements buried in filings. Structured. Queryable. Nowhere else.
Accurate cash runway. Most "months of cash remaining" calculations are a quarterly cash divided by a quarterly burn. Ours accounts for recent raises, warrant exercises, and actual operating burn pulled from the most recent 10-Q, updated filing by filing.
Shelf capacity relative to float. A 10M share shelf on a 2M share float is a completely different situation than the same shelf on a 500M share float. We calculate this ratio in real time. Most providers don't even store shelf data in a queryable format.
Pump-and-dump pattern scoring. Per-ticker scores for country, underwriter, float, and scam risk — each derived from structured filing data and paired with social-media evidence of an orchestrated pump-and-dump.
II — What It Took to Build Out This Data
Three years. Sleepless nights. A lot of things that didn't work.
The core problem: SEC filings are text. Thousands of pages of unstructured legal language, filed across dozens of form types, updated constantly. If you want structured data out of them, you either hire a team of analysts to read every filing by hand, or you build a system that can do it reliably at scale.
We chose the second path. Here's the rough shape of what it took:
Monitor every filing that can change capital structure. Not just the obvious ones (10-K, 10-Q, etc). The quiet ones too, with buried warrant exercises, debt conversions in exhibits, prospectus supplements that change shelf capacity mid-flight.
Build parsers for every form type. Each filing type has its own structure, its own language, its own edge cases. What a PIPE looks like in one 8-K exhibit is not what it looks like in another. The parsers have to handle all of it.
Layer AI on top of parsing. AI finds the keywords and phrases that suggest a dilution event, a new agreement, a compliance issue. Then manual verification commits the data. AI gets us 80% of the way; human review catches the edge cases that would otherwise corrupt the dataset.
Iterate constantly. Filing templates change. New deal structures emerge. Companies find new ways to raise capital that didn't exist five years ago. If the system isn't updated in real time, the data decays.
III — What You Can Build With It
The API has a host of endpoints covering dilution ratings, offerings, registrations, Nasdaq compliance, float, ownership, and bank agreements. Here are three things you can build today that would have taken a team of analysts to assemble manually.
1. A Dilution Risk Monitor
A watchlist dashboard that surfaces dilution warning signs across your portfolio in real time.
For each ticker, you get the overall dilution risk rating, active shelf registrations with remaining capacity, Nasdaq compliance deficiencies, and a cash runway calculation that tells you when the company will need to raise. Alert on things like cash dropping below 6 months, a new shelf going effective, or ATM capacity getting large relative to float.
2. Backtest Low-Float Gappers
Use the historical float endpoint to check performance on historical gappers under 1m float. Use the news endpoint 'tags' to see how gappers performed under certain news.
3. A One-Click Due Diligence Report
Take any ticker and generate a full due diligence report in seconds, ownership concentration, float history, reverse split count, ROFR agreements with active banks, upcoming lockup expiration… continue on X ↗


