Retail Investors Use XBRL Structured Data? Evidence from the SEC’s Server Log

Abstract

XBRL (eXtensible Business Reporting Language) has been touted as a new technology that may someday replace HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) as the standard method of statutory filings. This study offers some initial empirical evidence suggesting that retail investors do not use XBRL structured data as much as expected by the SEC (the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission). The result shows that the main reports in HTML format of 10-K filings are used much more frequently than the structured data in raw XBRL and the Microsoft Excel format. In addition, textual reports derived from XBRL data are also used more frequently than the two structured data formats. Taken together, the results suggest that the XBRL mandate pushed by the SEC may need a second look.

Keywords:

• Structured data
• Retail investor
• XBRL
• Microsoft Excel

Notes

1 There are a small number of cases in which companies filed 10-K main reports in PDF format in addition to HTML. These cases are included in our sample and counted as HTML.

2 See also Loughran and McDonald (2017) for detailed description of the log files.

3 However, the corresponding XBRL data was downloaded only 334 times. Examined in isolation, this Google extreme case clearly suggests that XBRL is rarely used by retail investors.

4 Note that the two lines of XBRL and XLS and the x-axis in the figure overlap and are not visually distinguishable.