XBRL stands for extensible business reporting language. Its a data format that companies use in reporting to the SEC.   I recently became interested in it from the point of view that it could help identify sustainable investments, and rate the environmental, social, and governance standing of a company, as ongoing R&D for the open finance initiative.  There is a lot of data that is closed regarding company practices, but with respect to XBRL, there is a ton of data, and its freely available online.

As a brief look of the implications of this data type, XBRL for Dummies describes one quality of XBRL as “A revolution for small investors, the most important shareholder initiative in a decade, and a leveler of the investment playing field”.  Beforehand, it may have been that only research companies with enough resources could collect information on businesses.  Now, XBRL opens this information up to a much wider set of people, most importantly those who don’t have the capital for research, data collection, and data cleaning.

If you want to pull it all, just open up Terminal in your mac (its under /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app).  Create a folder you want to keep the data in:

mkdir xbrl_data

cd xbrl_data

and then type in the command to pull all of the data

wget ftp://ftp.sec.gov/edgar/monthly/xbrl*

If you don’t have wget, you can download it here.  This will populate that directory with all of the XBRL data from April 2005 to the present, for each month.

If you want to look around at other data the SEC has, type in your browser

ftp.sec.gov

and you can poke around.  You can navigate to the same folder as before and download individual sets by hand as well:

ftp.sec.gov/edgar/monthly/

Currently I’m looking around for something that will make it easier to play around with the files and get an idea of what XBRL is, and how I can use it.  I spent some time looking around for libraries to parse the XBRL data, and found a ruby library xbrlware, a python platform arelle.  If you come across other useful libraries, share them.

update (8/14/11):

If you find yourself installing a lot of UNIX tools on your Mac, Homebrew is clean and easy to use.  To install Homebrew, enter this in Terminal

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/gist/323731)"

And then to install wget

brew install wget

Done!