Methodology

# How the ledger is built

## Source

Every row comes from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR system. The history is loaded from SEC's quarterly form indexes from 2002 Q4; new filings arrive from SEC's daily indexes every day at 06:30 UTC, with a second pass at 12:30 UTC. Company details (name, industry code, tickers, registration numbers) come from SEC's submissions data. SEC states that information on sec.gov is public and may be copied or further distributed; we cite the SEC as the source on every page and link every row to its filing.

The ledger starts on **4 November 2002**, the day foreign private issuers also had to file on EDGAR (SEC Release 33-8099), so the data covers U.S. and foreign issuers alike from day one.

## One row per filer

A filing made jointly by a parent company and its subsidiaries appears once for each of them, exactly as in SEC's own index. The home page folds such rows into one and shows the number of co-registrants.

## Offerings and labels

An offering is the chain of filings that share one SEC registration number (333-…): the registration, its amendments, the effectiveness notice, the final prospectus or a withdrawal, and — for shelves — the takedowns. Draft registration statements (DRS) carry a different number (377-…) and stay in the filings feed only.

| Label | Rule |
| --- | --- |
| IPO | A company's first S-1 or F-1 with no earlier 10-K, 10-Q, 20-F or 40-F on EDGAR, whose chain reached a final prospectus (424B4 or 424B1). |
| First-time registration | The same, without a final prospectus. Often a private subsidiary registering debt, a small self-underwritten offering or a resale. |
| SPAC | A registration by a company with SEC industry code 6770 (blank checks). |
| Registered company | An S-1 or F-1 by a company that already filed annual or quarterly reports: a resale or an additional offering. |
| Shelf | An S-3, S-3ASR or F-3 and its takedowns (424B5). |

Statuses: **Filed** — registration filed, nothing else yet; **Amended** — at least one amendment filed; **Effective** — declared effective (or an automatic shelf, or a takedown happened); **Final prospectus** — a final prospectus (424B4 or 424B1) was filed; **Withdrawn** — a request to withdraw (RW) was filed; **Dormant** — filed or amended, then nothing for 270 days — our rule, not an SEC status.

## Checks

Before launch every row of SEC's daily indexes on 20 random days was matched one by one against the ledger (0 errors), and ten first-time registrations were checked by hand against live SEC company histories (10 of 10). A daily index lists what SEC published that day, not what was filed that day — effectiveness notices appear a day later and drafts months later — so rows are matched one by one, not counted per day.

## Limits

- No prices: offering size and price live inside the prospectus text and are not extracted yet. No stock prices at all.

- A final prospectus shows an offering priced; it does not prove the deal closed.

- 2003 reads low for counts that start from a registration: offerings registered before 4 November 2002 are outside the ledger.

- Shelf takedowns (424B5) include debt and other securities, not only shares.

- Tickers and exchanges are SEC's current record; companies that were acquired or delisted show none.

- A company that listed through a spin-off or a direct listing has no annual report yet when it first registers shares, so its first offerings can carry the IPO label until that report is filed.

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Source page: https://equitycapital.markets/methodology · Data: U.S. SEC EDGAR · CC BY 4.0