At TagniFi we have a free account that provides access to end-of-day market data (TagniFi Markets) via our API at no cost. Data items include high, low, open, close and volume along with adjusted closing price (for splits and dividends). Documentation is at http://docs.tagnifi.com/article/63-search-tagnifi-markets. Sign up at https://www.tagnifi.com/trial
Note: we only limit our trial to the Dow 30 for our fundamental data (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement). Market data is not restricted to the Dow 30 for the trial which does not expire.
Quandl is a great company and it's an honor to be compared with them. However, we're quite different in that we collect and own our content. This vertical integration allows us to develop rich features that our clients are demanding. For example, we're in the process of rolling out right-click source data in Excel that will allow you to see how we calculated a value along with a link back to the source filing at the SEC. Without having control over the content it will be difficult to roll out these types of features. Another example of this is with our point-in-time capabilities for back-testing. Every item we collect is date-stamped so that you can run back tests based on what information was actually available on a date in the past. Without owning the data this is very difficult to accomplish.
This is a good idea but as others have highlighted the issue will be with data quality. At TagniFi we've been pretty vocal about the quality of the XBRL data because we find a lot of errors. Using the XBRL data directly from the SEC is the equivalent of drinking pond water since there is very little validation occurring[1]. This has resulted in a significant number of errors that will need to be corrected before consuming the data. We've automated some of this error correction but there are still quite a few that need human involvement. We also run all of the data through hundreds of QA checks to ensure data quality in the absence of validation.
What is the benefit to using your site instead of healthcare.gov? I just ran a search (I'm in Florida) and it looks like the same options I have on healthcare.gov.
Thanks for the feedback. You are correct that the lack of history is an issue for us but we have to start somewhere and the cost to collect non-XBRL data is really high. The timing of the available history in XBRL depends on the size of the company. XBRL was phased in starting in 2009 with the largest 500 companies filing their 2010 10-Ks in XBRL. These 10-Ks generally had income statement data back to 2007 so that is where most of our data starts on the larger companies. The next largest 1,500 companies started filing in 2010 so their data generally starts in 2008. The remaining 9,000 companies started filing XBRL in 2011 so their data generally starts in 2009. This means we have 7 years of data for the largest 500 companies, 6 years of data on the next largest 1,500 companies and 5 years of data on the remaining 9,000 companies. Since the cost to go back and collect this data manually is really high we are going to focus on building the deepest datasets (footnotes and industry-specific) to offset the lack of history.
"the lack of consistency in the format (in some cases, there's at least several hundred 'tags' for the same or similar financial line item) makes any large scale data processing from EDGAR a massive undertaking."
Izyda, you are absolutely correct on the issues with XBRL. I'm the co-founder of a company called TagniFi that is working on a solution. We have a standardized dataset that makes comparing this data across companies, industries and sectors possible. We are in beta so you are welcome to check out for API for free:
http://www.tagnifi.com
Note: we only limit our trial to the Dow 30 for our fundamental data (balance sheet, income statement, cash flow statement). Market data is not restricted to the Dow 30 for the trial which does not expire.