Methodology

The hard, valuable work is not scraping SEC text. It is determining that a transaction completed, reconciling contradictory disclosures, understanding capitalization and dilution, and maintaining pages after closing.

Editorial pipeline

1. Discover candidate transactions.
2. Establish issuer identity and CIK.
3. Gather the transaction evidence package.
4. Classify the transaction type.
5. Confirm completion against the completion test.
6. Normalize facts into the structured JSON record.
7. Create the source register with pinpoint locators.
8. Scaffold the MDX analysis page.
9. Reconcile sources and uses, capitalization, dilution and ownership.
10. Import and validate historical financials.
11. Add original accounting, risk and governance analysis.
12. Complete valuation workpapers.
13. Review calculations and citations.
14. Publish only after the minimum quality gates are met.
15. Update at one, three, six and twelve months and after material filings.

What automation does well

SEC ingestion is scripted and rate-limited to the SEC’s fair-access guidance:

• Discover filings by CIK, form and date.
• Download filing indexes and documents.
• Extract standardized XBRL financial data.
• Build registration and amendment timelines.
• Populate filing metadata and the source register skeleton.
• Scaffold company pages and standardized tables.
• Recalculate formulas and identify internal inconsistencies.

What requires analyst review

No script decides any of the following:

• Whether the transaction actually completed.
• The correct transaction classification.
• The reconstruction of sources and uses.
• The interpretation of sponsor, founder and private-equity economics.
• The reconciliation of basic and fully diluted shares.
• Whether a non-GAAP adjustment is genuinely nonrecurring.
• Comparable-company selection.
• DCF assumptions.
• The interpretation of risks and conflicts.
• The resolution of conflicting filing dates or values.

Quality gates before publication

A page is not published until:

• The completion evidence package reconciles.
• Every material fact carries a pinpoint locator resolving to a source-register row.
• Every calculated value has a formula, cited inputs and a stored expression that re-evaluates to its stated result.
• Sources and uses reconcile from gross proceeds to net cash delivered to the operating company.
• Reported facts, calculations, assumptions and conclusions are labelled distinctly.
• Known gaps are listed in the page’s open-items section rather than left implicit.

npm run verify runs the record validator, the calculation validator and a full build; all three must pass.

Repository architecture

The site is a static build with a deliberate two-layer content model.

Layer	Format	Role
Narrative analysis	Markdown/MDX	The editorial source. Long-form, human-written, component-composed.
Normalized facts	JSON	Dates, amounts, source IDs, calculations. Powers filters, comparisons, validation and export.
Modelling workpapers	Spreadsheet	DCF and comparable-company work. Approved assumptions and results are exported into JSON.
Published site	HTML	Generated. Transaction pages are never hand-authored in HTML.

Schemas are enforced at build time by Astro content collections (src/content.config.ts), so a record missing a source register, or carrying a malformed accession number or a non-ISO date, fails the build rather than reaching the site.

Word count

High word count is a consequence of completeness, not a target. A comprehensive page may naturally reach 7,500–20,000 words, but it must remain navigable through a table of contents, summary tables and clearly separated supporting detail. A short page that reconciles its transaction fully is better than a long one that does not.

Known limitations

• Market data should come from a consistent production provider with a stated benchmark; early pages cite publicly available historical-price tables and label them accordingly.
• Fully diluted capitalization requires option and equity-plan work that is not complete on every page. Where it is missing, the page says so and states which share count it used.
• SEC comment letters and amendment-by-amendment disclosure evolution are not yet analysed on every page.
• Time-sensitive figures carry an analysis-as-of date and are refreshed on a schedule, not continuously.