select-anchor-filing

select-anchor-filing

Design Principles

1. The filing is the single source of truth. Every fact traces to source_accession_number + verbatim source_text.
2. Fail closed on source ambiguity. Fail open on extraction incompleteness.
3. Facts before judgments. Proposals are raw events. Classification is Skill 8, not Skill 5.
4. Alex's collection instructions are the extraction spec. Used for methodology and taxonomy. Never as a factual source.
5. master.csv is the review artifact, not the estimation artifact.

Overview

Search SEC EDGAR for all 6 primary filing types by CIK, rank filings by chronology quality, and select the primary filing. Also discover supplementary filing candidates. This is the first skill in the deal-agent pipeline. If no usable filing is found, write a failure bundle and stop -- do not proceed to downstream skills.

Input

• deal_slug (passed by orchestrator)
• Seed row from Data/reference/deal_url_seeds.csv matching deal_slug

Output

• Data/deals/<slug>/source/source_selection.json Contains all primary searches, supplementary searches, and document selection rationale.

Tools

All SEC access is via curl in a shell command.

Procedure

1. Read seed entry from Data/reference/deal_url_seeds.csv for the given deal_slug. Extract target_name, filing_url, and any other seed fields.

2. Resolve CIK. curl the EDGAR company search page by target_name, extract the CIK from the HTML response. See references/edgar-search.md for URL patterns.

3. Search all 6 primary filing types by CIK regardless of whether a seed URL exists: DEFM14A, PREM14A, SC 14D-9, SC 13E-3, S-4, SC TO-T. For each type, curl the company filings page and parse results. Log every search and its disposition.

4. Select primary filing. Apply the filing preference ranking (see references/filing-types.md). Pick whichever filing has the most complete "Background of the Merger/Offer" section. If the seed provides a filing_url, treat it as the likely primary, but a higher-ranked filing discovered in step 3 may override it.

5. For the primary filing: curl its EDGAR index page, parse the document list (filename, description, size), select the main .htm document. Log the selection rationale and why other documents were rejected.

6. Discover supplementary candidates. All non-primary filings found in step 3 become supplementary candidates. Additionally search for: SC 13D, DEFA14A, 8-K. Log disposition for each.

7. Write source/source_selection.json with primary_searches, supplementary_searches, and document_selection. See references/edgar-search.md for the schema.

SEC User-Agent (Required)

All curl commands to sec.gov or efts.sec.gov MUST include:

-H "User-Agent: [email protected] deal-extraction-tool/1.0"

SEC blocks requests without a proper User-Agent header.

Gate

At least one filing in source_selection.json has disposition "selected".

Failure Mode

Fail closed. If no filing has a usable background section after searching all 6 types, write source/failure_bundle.json and stop. Do not proceed to Skill 2.

{
  "reason": "no usable filing found across all 6 primary types",
  "last_successful_step": "cik_resolved",
  "candidates_found": []
}

Required Reading

1. references/edgar-search.md -- CIK resolution, URL patterns, schema
2. references/filing-types.md -- type descriptions, preference ranking