There's so much financial news these days that making sense of it all from a trading perspective increasingly calls for enhanced software. Machine-readable news services have certainly generated more interest. But what about creating the news? Is that something software can do as well?

MarketBrief, a start up in Silicon Valley, certainly thinks so. According to New Scientists, the company intends to take advantage of the SEC's mandate that all public companies file statements in XBRL, using it to crank out more than 1,000 stories a day. Recall that Phase 1 of the XBRL mandate--which covers the main numbers--is just about complete. To be sure, these initial "stories" will by definition be prosaic.

 "The result is readable, if dull. Kellogg W K Foundation Trust sold 100,000 shares of Kellogg Co stock, or $5,300,170 worth, as noted in an SEC Filing today, is a typical example. But MarketBrief will beat a human journalist to the punch every time, as the company claims it takes just three to 20 seconds for it to break a story."

But as the tagging goes deeper--and if the content of financial reports is enhanced--it's likely that substance will improve. Phase 2 of the SEC's XBRL rollout calls for more tagging of the detailed footnotes to the numbers. And we may see a mandate for a more complete narrative by audit firms about the company's numbers. So if the quality of the financial reports improve, XBRL will make it easier for MarketBrief to boost the substance of its stories. It'll be a long time before it wins a Pulitzer, in any case.

I think the future of any company in this area is in using tagged data to do more than report the basics on a discrete company-by-company basis. The firms most likely to make a splash will be those that create compelling analytical reports that cut across companies, analyzing them in the context of entire industries and self-defined groups. It would be great if the analysis could be supplemented by rich data visualizations. It remains to be seen how the stock research industry uses the new tagged data-if at all.

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