BamSEC Review – Is This Tool Worth Using?

BamSEC is a simple, but powerful tool for researching a company’s SEC filings. The platform categorizes findings so you can easily see the latest updates from companies you’re watching. It also offers database-wide searches and alerts so you can use SEC filings to get a leg up on other traders and investors.

BamSEC is pricey compared to other SEC filing search tools. However, it also offers more data and better search tools. Our BamSEC review will help you decide if this platform is right for you.

BamSEC Pricing Options

BamSEC costs $828 per year. There is no monthly subscription option. You can try out the software for free for 7 days (credit card required).

BamSEC Features

Company Filings

BamSEC allows you to search for any company registered with the SEC, including OTC and penny stocks. You can view filings broken down by category or in chronological order. Categories include financials (10-K and 10-Q filings), news (8-K filings), prospectuses and registrations (including S-1, S-3, and S-8 filings), ownership (Form 4 and 13G filings), and proxies (14A filings). Whether viewing filings by type or date, you can quickly enter a custom filter that runs a search of the text contained in all the documents.

BamSEC also uses filing data to break down a company’s ownership. You can view recent filings for all company insiders and institutional owners. There’s also a list of recent insider transactions, which you can filter by insider and whether the transaction took place on the open market or through a Rule 10b5-1 transaction.

Notably, BamSEC also pulls key exhibits from companies’ SEC filings and organizes them into searchable lists. These exhibits include credit agreements, indentures, merger and acquisition agreements, and underwriting agreements for share offerings. 

Another neat feature is that you can highlight text in any document in BamSEC, and the platform will automatically save that highlighted text. When you return to a company’s page, you can quickly pull up all of the sections of text you’ve highlighted from that company’s filings. This is a nice way to keep track of interesting findings if you spend time analyzing a company, then return to it months later after a new quarterly financial filing is released.

Document Search

One of the most powerful features of BamSEC is its database-wide document search. You can search for any phrase, and BamSEC will instantly return a list of all companies that have filings that contain that phrase.

By default, results are organized according to which companies have the most filings that contain your search term. You can choose a time limit ranging from three months to all-time for what filings to include. Alternatively, you can also view results as individual filings organized in chronological order.

In either case, BamSEC enables you to filter your results by market cap, industry, and filing types. You can also limit your search to only companies that are on your BamSEC watchlist.

Recent Filings

If you want to view all recent filings by type, you can do that, too. BamSEC offers chronological lists of new securities registrations (including S-1 filings), secondary securities offerings (S-3 and S-8 filings), proxy documents, and late filings. You can filter these lists by company market cap and industry.

Importantly, BamSEC doesn’t list new 10-K and 10-Q financial filings or new 8-K news filings.

Alerts

BamSEC offers two ways to receive email alerts about new filings of interest.

First, you can turn on alerts for specific types of filings across all companies that BamSEC monitors. For example, anytime a new 8-K form is filed by any company, you can receive a notification. You can filter these alerts by market cap or industry. Helpfully, BamSEC gives you an estimate of how many emails per week you’ll receive for your chosen alert.

You can also activate alerts for a specific phrase. You can enter a custom phrase and then filter alerts by market cap, industry, or filing type.

BamSEC Customization and Layout

BamSEC lets you add companies to a personal watchlist. Filings within the last 30 days by your watchlisted companies are displayed on BamSEC’s dashboard. You can customize which types of filings from each company to display in this feed. You can also turn on email alerts for new filings from any of your watchlisted companies.

BamSEC Platform Differentiators

BamSEC makes it simple to retrieve data from corporate SEC filings. While this data is available for free in the SEC’s EDGAR database, BamSEC organizes it and makes it searchable.

The most impressive feature BamSEC offers is its database-wide text search. You can search for a phrase across all SEC filings and get results in a second. There are API-based tools that can also do this, like SEC-API, but they’re significantly more complex to use. The ability to create text-based alerts is also useful for investors who want to follow a specific company, market trend, or event.

BamSEC also makes it simple to spot new filings, especially for companies in your watchlist. This is a major advantage over competing tools like FlashSEC, which doesn’t offer a list of new filings or any alerts.

One drawback to BamSEC is that although it offers information about shelf registrations and secondary offerings, it doesn’t do much to help investors analyze these filings. In contrast, Dilution Tracker, another tool that analyzes SEC filings, is designed specifically to help investors understand a company’s history of share dilutions.

What Type of Trader is BamSEC Best For?

BamSEC is a powerful platform for traders who want to use SEC filings to get a leg up on the market. Traders can use BamSEC’s watchlist and alerts to stay ahead of the curve when a company issues a new 8-K filing or shelf offering, or when there’s a significant insider transaction. They can also use BamSEC’s search alerts to follow specific market trends or financial news events.

BamSEC is very expensive compared to alternative tools for searching SEC filings. It costs nearly twice as much per year as FlashSEC and almost $250 more per year than SEC-API.  However, it offers more functionality than FlashSEC and is easier to use than SEC-API, so BamSEC can be worth it if you have a large amount of capital and can use the platform’s alerts to your advantage.