Inspiration
Category: Accessibility in Civic Services
Recently there have been increased hostility on fixed income markets. Investment funds are competing with each other by finding loopholes in loan documents of public companies and monetizing them through various transactions, a phenomena known as "creditor on creditor violence". The idea behind Debt Docs was to create a tool that would facilitate analysis of corporate debt by extracting features of loan documents and checking them against known cases of creditor on creditor violence, allowing to identify debt securities with weak protections.
What it does
It allows to match up outstanding debt securities with sec.gov filings using stock ticker. It matches bonds with indentures and credit agreements and extracts covenants (things that establish what can and cannot be done)
How we built it
We use FINRA and sec.gov to collect data. Process the data in python, and display it in flask app.
Challenges we ran into
It is virtually impossible to obtain well formatted data on corporate bonds matched with loan documents without having access to expensive software. Thus we focused on creating an app that uses free publicly available data to allow anybody to analyze corporate debt in a better way.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
That despite being buggy and incomplete, we think it is the only free tool that can provide some of the credit analysis functionality that usually is only obtainable with $20,000+/year software.
What we learned
We learned a lot about the problem of obtaining accurate and comprehensive data on corporate bonds that retail investors face.
What's next for Debt Docs
Extract specific covenants. Additionally, case studies of "creditor on creditor violence" transactions (i.e. trap door, asset stripping, manufactured default, uptiering) can be used to develop covenant vulnerability patterns and flag securities with weak protection.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.