2016: The year in filings

Every year in January, we like to step back and take a look at the world that was in terms of filings.

The number of filings made to the SEC was only modestly higher than in 2015: 670,831 compared with 662,936 for 2015, or 1.1% higher. Those numbers still pale in comparison to the 750,000 filed in 2007, or the year before the last stock market bubble burst. Given the current political climate, and the urge to repeal Dodd-Frank (see H.R. 78), it will be interesting to see if those numbers change at all in 2017.

About 1/3 of those filings were insider-trading related (which we don’t pay as close attention to, but people like Asif Suria, among others do).

We asked the folks at Sentieo to run the numbers on the filings that we do pay close attention to: 10Ks, 10Qs, 8Ks and proxies. These were some of the more interesting stats:

• The single largest 10-K filed last year was over 3,300 pages and filed by Ashford Hospitality Trust on Feb. 29. That might be a place where incoming SEC Chairman Jay Clayton might want to start, since it’s safe to assume that virtually nobody (except perhaps the attorneys who drafted it) read a 3,300 page filing. Just to put that in perspective, the largest 10-K in 2015 was 1,000 pages lighter. And the largest 10-K in 2014 was 2,000 pages.
• Financials continued to dominate the filings, with J.P. Morgan filing 4,085 separate filings last year. Given that there were around 250 work days last year, that works out to about 16 filings each day the SEC is open. Credit Suisse and Blackstone were a more distant second and third, with 3,406 and 3,206 filings respectively.
• There were 67,744 8Ks filed last year.
• The Friday Night Dump — something we track closely for our Pro subscribers — continued unabated. We also post some of our observations on twitter. Just over 8% of all 8Ks filed were filed during the last 90 minutes of the day on a Friday.
• Valentine’s Day remained the single busiest day for SEC filings. Isn’t that romantic?

We’ll continue to dig through the filings and monitor what we expect to be many changes at the SEC. Best wishes for a happy, healthy and successful year in 2017!

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Journalists who are interested in seeing all the numbers behind today’s story can contact Michelle directly for more details.