Extracting Australian Corporate Data – Substantial Shareholders and Directors Trades

Australia has unique access to all company announcements made on the ASX back to 1992. This data provides a rich resource from which to determine a number of research projects – predominantly surrounding the information content of these significant trades. The majority of the data is encoded with embedded text PDFs, which allows the data to be automatically extracted. In a sample paper (now published in Pacific Basin), Foley, Kwan, Philip and McInish (2017) were able to successfully extract approximately 60% of trades automatically. Unfortunately many of these documents are hand-written, which requires manual data extraction. Once placed into a database these documents could be used by members of the discipline to undertake unique corporate finance / microstructure analyses, leading to many potential research projects.