Feature Article
Debt Disclosure in SEC Filings (and Elsewhere)
by Peter Schwartz

Two weeks ago, we observed that the total value of US debt greatly exceeds the market value of publicly traded companies. Yet the SEC, for numerous reasons, does not mandate the same type of transparency for publicly traded debt securities as it does for publicly traded equity securities. Nonetheless, a vast amount of valuable debt-related information resides in SEC filings and exhibits. Knowledge Mosaic can highlight, extract, and make transparent this information.

Debt-Related Filings

Issuers must register debt securities with the SEC, typically via forms S-3 or S-4. Issuers may file 424b prospectus documents with the SEC. Since December 2005, seasoned issuers have also been able to expose valuable information in the Free Writing Prospectus (FWP).

Other filings that include debt-related information include 8-K current reports, 10-K annual reports, 10-Q quarterly reports, and their foreign registrant equivalents. Comment letters containing communications on filings requirements often address debt-related disclosure issues. 13F filings disclose institutional ownership of debt securities.

Debt-Related Exhibits

The SEC filings contain nearly 10 million exhibits, including indenture agreements, credit facility agreements, and an array of notes and funding agreements. We have identified more than 40,000 base indenture agreements. We can tag internal content such as covenant information from these sets of exhibits, along with issuer and trustee metadata, and present this information in a format optimized for rapid and powerful retrieval and analysis.

Delivering Data as well as Documents

Knowledge Mosaic excels at extracting valuable information from unstructured documents. We provide our customers with custom, debt-focused alerting, filtering, and search capabilities at the document level. We also supply our customers with parsed debt disclosure information from SEC filings and enforcement actions.

Relevant data sets include individual Risk Factors; 8-K items (many of which are relevant for assessing credit risk); 10-K items (including capital structure data); individual Financial Statement Notes; SEC notices of investigation disclosure; SEC defendant data; and data parsed from filing exhibits (such as Indenture Covenants).

If you have research questions or projects involving debt disclosure information in SEC filings, don’t hesitate to contact us at any time.

Narrowing your search by SIC or NAICS codes allows you great precision in filtering companies belonging to a certain industry. However, if efficiency is more important to you than precision, we recommend our Industry menu (which is extracted from the NAICS list). To scroll through industries beginning with a certain letter of the alphabet, click into the menu and type the letter until you see your entry. For example, to locate companies in the "Computer and Electronic Manufacturing" industry, click on the Industry menu and type the letter C until that entry appears.

Need to print or email a large number of filings? Our Document Cart will save you cartloads of time. From your search results on the All SEC Filings page, simply check the boxes next to the items you want to print or email, then click "Add Checked to Cart."
The Document Cart holds up to 25 items at once and allows you to print multiple filings as a single, concatenated PDF document; or email multiple documents in one simple step.

Where you search depends on exactly what you're looking for. Beneficial Ownership tables are a required part of every company's Annual 10-K Report (and can also be found in Registration Statements and certain Proxy Statements), and may be all you need. Otherwise, supplement with event-driven filings--those triggered by specific changes to a company's ownership makeup. These include the ubiquitous forms 3 and 4 for 10%+ owning "insiders," and Schedules 13D and 13G for 5%+ "outsider" owners. For the latter, use our Beneficial Ownership Form Group.

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