On August 20th, the SEC adopted amendments to improve transparency in the municipal securities market by better informing investors about the current financial condition of issuers of municipal securities and obligated persons. These amendments concern Rule 15c2-12 of the Securities Exchange Act and focus on the material financial obligations that could influence an issuer’s liquidity, overall creditworthiness, or an existing security holder’s rights.
Continue reading "SEC Adopts Rule Amendments to Improve Municipal..." »Wednesday, August 22. 2018
SEC Adopts Rule Amendments to Improve Municipal Securities Disclosure
Monday, August 20. 2018
SEC Adopts Amendments to Simplify and Update Disclosure Requirements
On August 17th, the SEC voted to approve amendments to certain disclosure requirements that have become duplicative, overlapping, or outdated. These changes were proposed in light of other disclosure requirements, modifications to US-GAAP, or developments in the information environment. The SEC is also referring to the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) particular disclosure requirements that overlap with but require information incremental to GAAP. These requirements will be considered for incorporation into US GAAP.
Continue reading "SEC Adopts Amendments to Simplify and Update..." »Friday, August 17. 2018
LDC #98: Conditionals, If You Want Me To
Language directives allow you to change the code the programming language sees when it runs. We’ve talked a little bit about directives before, but today I will take a look at a subset of directives: conditionals. Conditionals allow a programmer to add or remove sections of code based on the existence of other directives. This means that it’s easy to build larger suites of code while allowing sections of code to be taken out without causing errors during runtime.
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Friday, August 10. 2018
LDC #97: Creating a Filing Calendar
Everyone in the EDGAR industry has experienced the customer who wants to know what the filing deadline is. For most companies the deadlines are easily found using a search engine. But what happens when your customer has an unusual fiscal year end? You can scramble to figure it out or you can just plug numbers into this week’s blog script does all the date calculations for you.
Continue reading "LDC #97: Creating a Filing Calendar" »Friday, August 03. 2018
LDC #96: Data Compression - Part I
Various forms of data compression are employed all over the computing world. In many instances, you may need to read compressed data or create your own. This article is the first in a series about data compression and the tools available within Legato. We will start with an overview and then dive into the ubiquitous zip method by creating a little program to zip a project.
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Wednesday, August 01. 2018
SEC Proposes Rules to Simplify and Streamline Disclosures in Certain Registered Debt Offerings
The SEC proposed rule amendments on July 24th to simplify and streamline the financial disclosure requirements applicable to registered debt offerings. These debt offerings are for guarantors and issuers of guaranteed securities, as well as for affiliates whose securities collateralize a registrant’s securities. The proposed amendments pertain to Rules 3-10 and 3-16 of Regulation S-X.
Continue reading "SEC Proposes Rules to Simplify and Streamline..." »Monday, July 30. 2018
SEC Adopts Rules to Enhance Transparency and Oversight of Alternative Trading Systems
On July 18th, the SEC announced it will adopt amendments to Regulation ATS to enhance operational transparency and regulatory oversight of alternative trading systems (ATSs). This pertains to such systems that trade stocks listed on a national securities exchange (NMS Stock ATSs).
Continue reading "SEC Adopts Rules to Enhance Transparency and..." »Friday, July 27. 2018
LDC #95: Endnote to Footnote Mapper
This week, we’re going to take a closer look at a script that’s been in GoFiler for a while as a base script, but has been through several revisions. This script, the Endnotes to Footnotes converter, takes endnotes in an HTML file and moves them to the appropriate page in the HTML file. These endnotes are common if you have a Word file that has been converted to HTML, that had footnotes in it. They are often converted as endnotes, and putting them back where they belong can be annoying if you have to do it manually.
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Wednesday, July 25. 2018
SEC Adopts Final Rules to Modernize Offerings Pursuant to Compensatory Arrangements
On July 18th, the SEC issued final rules to amend the Securities Act Rule 701. Rule 701 provides an exemption from registration for securities issued by non-reporting companies pursuant to compensatory arrangements. The amendment increases the threshold of aggregate sales price or amount of securities sold in excess of which the issuer is required to deliver additional disclosures from $5 million to $10 million, in accordance with the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act.
Continue reading "SEC Adopts Final Rules to Modernize Offerings..." »Friday, July 20. 2018
LDC #94: Taking Command Of GoFiler
Legato is an extremely powerful tool that allows you take control of GoFiler by helping you to automate tasks and giving you new features. In addition to Legato, GoFiler also includes a command line API, allowing you to perform some tasks without fully opening GoFiler. You can combine these features together to have GoFiler run Legato scripts from the command line interface. This means that your possibilities are actually endless for what you can accomplish. Today we are going to discuss extending your control over GoFiler by using the Windows command line to communicate directly with Legato, allowing you to write scripts that can span multiple computers.
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Friday, July 13. 2018
LDC #93: Managing Memory in Legato
For this week’s blog we are going to shift from our usual discussions of what you can do with Legato to instead discuss how to make efficient Legato code. Like many scripting languages, in Legato you as the programmer typically do not need to worry about memory as the language takes care of a lot of it behind the scenes. That being said, you shouldn’t always ignore memory considerations when you write scripts. Doing so may result in a bad user experience or, even worse, unexpected failures. In this blog we will discuss some of the common pitfalls and how to avoid them.
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Monday, July 09. 2018
SEC Releases EDGAR 18.2
On July 9, 2018, EDGAR Release 18.2 was released by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This release contains a number of changes to various EDGAR forms as well as support for the IFRS 2018 XBRL taxonomy.
Continue reading "SEC Releases EDGAR 18.2" »Friday, July 06. 2018
LDC #92: Capturing Images from the Clipboard
Occasionally I have had the need to serially capture images for later use. There are a number of utilities available, some free, with varying capabilities, that do this. Recently I was asked to try get download a bunch of photos from a site that had no simple way to download images. To accomplish this, I wrote a little script that lets a user capture images, presumably from a screenshot or from a right-click “Copy” command, and serially store them.
Continue reading "LDC #92: Capturing Images from the Clipboard" »Tuesday, July 03. 2018
SEC Expands the Scope of Smaller Public Companies that Qualify for Scaled Disclosures
During the June 28th Open Meeting, the SEC voted to expand the definition of “smaller reporting companies” (SRC) to allow for more companies to qualify for certain existing scaled disclosure accommodations. The SRC category was established in 2008 in an effort to provide greater regulatory relief for smaller companies, as SRCs can provide scaled disclosures under Regulations S-K and S-X.
Continue reading "SEC Expands the Scope of Smaller Public..." »Monday, July 02. 2018
SEC Adopts Targeted Changes to Public Liquidity Risk Management Disclosure
The SEC voted on June 28th, 2018 to adopt amendments to public liquidity-related disclosure requirements for certain open-end funds. These funds must now discuss in their annual or semi-annual shareholder reports the operation and effectiveness of their liquidity risk management programs. This requirement replaces a quantitative end-of-period discussion of historic aggregate liquidity classification data for fund portfolios as part of Form N-PORT.
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