I wish to expand a little upon John Swift's article regarding EDGAR Online (EDGR 1.20, 52-week range .71 – 2.20), hopefully adding some further context for investors.

Competitive Landscape
Thomson Reuters Corporation (TRI)
Swift notes that EDGAR Online’s competitors in the subscriptions and data business are “much larger and better-capitalized companies,” citing among others, Thomson Reuters. He further asserts, “EDGR simply does not add enough value with its services.”

Thomson Reuters is in fact EDGAR Online’s partner in marketing I-Metrix, the company's high-end XBRL-powered financial analytics tool. As Thomson Reuters VP Keith Haurie stated, “EDGAR Online’s technologies and capabilities will enable us to continue to deliver the state-of the-art, cutting-edge technology our clients expect. Access to I-Metrix XBRL-powered data and analytical tools is a natural next enhancement to SECPlus on Checkpoint, our flagship product for SEC compliance.” (Source: June 16, 2008 Thomson Reuters’ press release entitled, “Thomson Reuters partners with EDGAR Online to Launch I-Metrix on Checkpoint”)

Thanks to a 219% increase in XBRL filings, EDGAR Online (EDGR) just reported higher revenue and income for the 2009 third quarter. Importantly, XBRL filing revenue represented 28.2% of total revenue, a major accomplishment. Company management has focused on delivering the company's highly automated filing solution. These results were achieved in an environment where only 500 of the approximate 12,000 SEC-reporting companies have been mandated to file in XBRL.

Operating income swung more than $1.0 million from $(629,000) to $451,000. Shareholders of EDGAR Online have been investing and building their massive company financial database (now formatted in XBRL) for about ten years; and red ink has painted their results quarter after quarter. Their incredibly bold corporate bet on XBRL's becoming the worldwide financial reporting standard was an extraordinary one for a nano-cap company with limited resources.

On Monday, EDGAR Online (EDGR) issued a special report to shareholders announcing their market-share data for the first reporting period subject to the SEC's XBRL mandate. See my earlier summary report on the competitive landscape for this XBRL filings market.

EDGAR Online and RR Donnelley (RRD) formed a partnership to provide XBRL conversion services to companies reporting to the SEC. See their joint website at www.TryXBRL.com.

Yesterday was the first time I'd seen complete XBRL filing results for Bowne (BNE) and Merrill. Aliya Sternstein's Nextgov.com article helps to clarify the early leaders in the race to provide XBRL filing services. The article notes that Bowne & Co. had "filed XBRL documents on 120 public companies," and "Merrill processed documents for about 70 companies."

By combining these new results with the XBRL Cloud Report, it is possible to estimate the leading filers' market shares. There were a total of 427 XBRL filings made to the SEC pursuant to the SEC mandate as of Sept. 14, 2009. There may be some additional quarterly reports made for companies filing late or with non-calendar quarterly reporting dates.

XBRL Cloud has just released its "XBRL Cloud EDGAR Dashboard," an objective third-party study of XBRL filers' compliance with the new SEC mandate (pdf file). Using data-mining tools, the Cloud captures all sorts of filing details and competitive information. This report is exactly what the SEC wants - transparency of financial reporting by SEC-filing companies and timely public access to comparative standards-based financial reports. The SEC has mandated that all SEC-reporting companies start filing in XBRL between now and 2011.

The XBRL Cloud report provides information regarding the competitive landscape. Here is a breakdown of the companies mentioned in the report:

EDGAR Online, Inc. (EDGR) [$1.35 Nasdaq, $41 million cap, 52-week range: 2.83 - .60] will report Q3 earnings in a couple of weeks. I expect continuing lackluster legacy product sales but significant gains in XBRL filings revenue and the number of XBRL corporate clients served. Emerging XBRL market trends suggest a far larger potential for EDGAR Online than I had originally thought.

Research analysts are quick to discount newly defined markets and their impact on particular companies. However, far more interesting are those potentially large markets which are hard to define, where companies' market shares are not disclosed, where the timing of future revenue is non-quantifiable, and where the profitability on those revenues is no more than a stab in the dark.

Yesterday, EDGAR Online, Inc. [EDGR $1.25 Nasdaq, $33.3 million cap, 52-week range: 2.83 - .60] started reporting 'XBRL Filings' revenue as a separate line item.

As previously noted, EDGR is the market's "only pure play on XBRL." Other XBRL software and service providers are either privately held or very small parts of publicly traded companies like Bowne (BNE), Microsoft (MSFT), RR Donnelley (RRD), Hitachi (HIT), SAP (SAP), Fujitsu (FJTSY), and Oracle (ORCL). Private companies include Rivet Software, Merrill Corporation, JustSystems Corp., and EDGAR Filings.

EDGAR Online, Inc. [(EDGR) $0.88 Nasdaq, $24 mil. cap.) 52-week range: 2.83 - 0.60

EDGAR Online, Inc. estimates that the following number of companies will be impacted by the SEC's recent phased-in mandate requiring companies to file their financial reports in XBRL format:

Even with today's detailed asset allocation and performance reports, do portfolio managers really know what their common stock holdings delivered in terms of revenue, earnings, cash flow, and equity? By "delivered," I refer to the financial results attributed to the portfolio by virtue of its owning shares of common stock. The "Ownership View" digs deeper and identifies what the owner's share of the companies' results are---based on the portfolio's % of the company owned.

Here is a high-tech/internet portfolio of 10 companies with position values ranging from $5,000 - $14,000 and the related valuation ratios.

ETF and portfolio managers provide detailed information regarding company portfolio weightings and the portfolio's weighted-average P/E ratio. However, no information is provided as to the portfolio's actual attributed revenue, earnings, cash flow and book value from the companies owned. Now that the XBRL reporting standard has been mandated by the SEC, hopefully, managers will consider disclosing their portfolio's actual ownership interest in their portfolio holdings. Interactive data makes it possible to "drill down" to the component companies' financial results.

Today, the weighted-average portfolio valuation ratios are calculated by simply position-weighting the P/E ratios or other valuation ratios. However, by using the actual as-reported XBRL financial data, it is possible to get the true ownership view---what the owner's portfolio is being attributed in terms of revenue, earnings, cash flow, and book value from the portfolio holdings.