I thought I haven’t been able to tweet much these days and owe my loyal followers something to compensate for that :). Some of you might already know this but I doubt it’s very common. So here we go.

This post is here to prevent you from paying for something you can already get for free. Faster and better than any paid service. 

If you’re a trader, you ideally already know how to read SEC filings and decrypt important information that companies (at least the companies I deal with most of the time) sometimes don’t want the average investor to see. You also should know that all SEC filings are available for free at http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html

This is basic stuff. 

The thing is, going through these filings, monitoring them consistently is a tough job. But sometimes being aware of these SEC filings before anyone else can give you a tremendous edge. It can be a financing deal, insider trading or contract news which won’t be on the wires or will take some time before it’s there. 

For this reason there are many websites that will monitor these filings for you, report insider trading information etc. At a significant cost, of course.

However, you can get all of this for free and most of the time faster than any of those websites. Also, you can create a portfolio and customize which companies’ filings you want to be aware of.

All you need is an RSS reader. There are many varieties for free out there. I use Google Reader. ( http://reader.google.com )

If you don’t know what an RSS feed is, please google it. Basically it lets you know when a webpage is updated and gives you the updated content.

I’m assuming you have a Google account. All you need now is, adding RSS feeds of the stocks you want to monitor. This may take some time but it’s a one-time thing. All you do is, click “Add Subscription” button on Google Reader. And as the address, you will enter something like this:

http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001083522&type=&dateb=&owner=include&start=0&count=40&output=atom

This is for Jones Soda (JSDA). Each company has a serial number called “CIK” and you can find CIK for every listed company here:

http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/cik.htm

When you get the CIK for the company you want to monitor, change the CIK part (in bold above) with the CIK for the company you’re adding.

Rinse & Repeat until you have all the companies you want to monitor.

Mark all as read in your RSS reader so that you have a clean start.

After this, whenever there’s a filing, you’ll get a lightning fast notification in your RSS reader. It can be very handy. And best of all, it’s free. This is what it looks like (you can rename the feeds to match the symbols if you can’t memorize the company names):

Hope this helps :)