Posted on 04/30/2008 9:11:54 PM PDT by zeestephen
"Soon all companies will report financials in a programming language called XBRL that will allow you and me to slice and dice numbers like never before." -SNIP- "The idea behind XBRL, short for eXtensible Business Reporting Language, is simple: Instead of treating numbers in financial reports like dumb text on a page, it assigns a "bar code" tag to each number. So no matter what company you are looking at, the same tag will flag the figures for sales or gross margins in a master database at the SEC." -SNIP- ""For the first time, instantly, you'll be able to compare any item of financial information from thousands of companies around the world," SEC Chairman Christopher Cox said in a prepared statement to MSN Money. "The light that this will shed on stocks, bonds, and mutual funds will make investing choices far more understandable for every American. Interactive data is to financial reporting what Gutenberg's moveable type was to printing."
(Excerpt) Read more at articles.moneycentral.msn.com ...
I know. I know. I owe you a keyboard.
You think this will work?
>>>”The light that this will shed on stocks, bonds, and mutual funds will make investing choices far more understandable for every American. Interactive data is to financial reporting what Gutenberg’s moveable type was to printing.”
...
[start off-balance-sheet-items hidden=true location=cayman]
[start cdo]
$5,000,000,000
[end cdo]
...
I don’t think the transparency will increase using this method. H***, we can’t get cash flow reporting or net earnings consistent between companies.
Wonderful news for all of us who do our own taxes, even if we’re not day trading. I position/swing trade and even that creates a huge amount of paperwork come tax time.
The worst things to deal with are the MLP’s for gas & oil pipelines and their K-1s. It would be be a huge boon for those of us who invest in MLP’s and have to spent time sorting through the K-1’s and matching up the numbers with the IRS forms...
Yes, all the examples you noted are "programming" languages. You can write "programs" with all of them which are capable of being executed on a computer, because they provide the syntax & semantics necessary to represent both a sequence of operations, as well as data.
XBRL however, is not a "programming" language. It's a taxonomy & schema, a way of representing data/information only. XBRL does not define operations. Unlike the examples you cite, you cannot write a program in XBRL. All you can do is represent data in a common way that is mutually understandable within a well defined [business oriented] community of practice.
Just because something is not a human language, or even if it's meant for consumption by computers, does not automatically make it a "programming" language. Think "data" language, or schema instead.
Thanks.
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