Dotcom On Steroids GQG Partners
Below is a "starter‑kit" you can drop into any project where you need to gather data about a company, clean it up, and turn it into something useful for analysis or modelling.
It’s broken down by the categories you listed (Company & Sector > Data Collection > Cleaning/Preprocessing > Feature Engineering). For each step I give:
What to collect – key fields that usually matter in finance / economics studies.
How to get it – a quick‑start list of APIs, libraries, or manual methods.
Typical pitfalls & tricks – things you’ll run into and how to handle them.
Feel free to cherry‑pick the parts you need; the whole thing can be reused as a template.
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1️⃣ Company & Sector
What | Why it matters | Where to get it |
---|---|---|
Ticker / ISIN / CUSIP | Uniquely identifies the firm. | Exchange website, Bloomberg, Refinitiv, OpenFIGI. |
Company name, sector, industry classification (GICS, NAICS) | Needed for grouping and benchmarking. | S&P Global Data, MSCI, FactSet, IHS Markit. |
Country of incorporation / HQ | Affects regulatory regime & currency. | Company filings (SEC EDGAR, Companies House), Bloomberg. |
Market cap / enterprise value | Determines size relative to peers. | Yahoo Finance, Google Finance, Refinitiv. |
Financial statement links | To source data for analysis. | SEC filings, company website investor relations. |
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3. Data Sources – What They Provide
Source | Typical Data Provided | Strengths | Weaknesses / Cost |
---|---|---|---|
SEC EDGAR (U.S.) | Annual/quarterly reports, financial statements, footnotes, management discussion, and analysis | Free; official filings; granular detail | Only U.S. companies; requires parsing |
Company Investor Relations websites | PDFs of annual reports, investor presentations, earnings releases | Direct source; sometimes supplementary data (graphs) | Inconsistent formatting; not always downloadable automatically |
FactSet / Bloomberg Terminal / Thomson Reuters Eikon | Financial statements, ratios, cash flow tables, footnotes | Comprehensive; includes foreign companies; standardization | Subscription costs; licensing limits |
Capital IQ / S&P Global Market Intelligence | Structured financial data, footnote extraction | Standardized; includes non-U.S. entities | High cost |
SEC EDGAR (U.S.) | XBRL filings with structured data, footnotes embedded | Free; high quality for U.S. companies | Limited to U.S. companies only |
Data.gov / Data.gov.uk | Government datasets, often unstructured PDFs or CSVs | Free; sometimes contains raw financial statements | Requires manual parsing |
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3. Comparative Analysis of Key Platforms
Platform | Accessibility | Data Quality | Footnote Coverage | Licensing & Cost | Integration Complexity |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
SEC EDGAR | Free, public API | High (official filings) | Embedded in XBRL; footnotes often present as separate nodes | No cost | Moderate: XML/XBRL parsing required |
Securities & Exchange Commission APIs | Free | High | Footnotes via linked documents | No cost | Simple HTTP requests |
Open Data Portals (e.g., Data.gov) | Varies | Medium | Footnote presence depends on dataset | Free or open license | Variable: depends on data format |
Commercial Financial Databases (Bloomberg, Refinitiv) | Subscription-based | Very high | Rich footnotes and annotations | High cost | Complex SDKs/APIs |
Custom Scraping of Company Filings | Free | Low to medium | Depends on filing content | No cost | Requires HTML parsing, potential legal concerns |
2.2 Comparative Summary
Data Source | Accessibility | Data Quality | Footnote Availability | Cost | Technical Complexity |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Public Company Filings (SEC) | High | Moderate | Variable; often limited | Free | Medium (HTML parsing, PDF extraction) |
Regulatory Agency Datasets | Moderate | High | Structured footnotes | Varies | Low to Medium |
Commercial Databases (Bloomberg, Refinitiv) | Limited | Very high | Rich metadata including footnotes | High | Low (API usage) |
Open Data Platforms (Kaggle, GitHub) | Variable | Variable | Depends on source | Free | Medium |
Proprietary Internal Datasets | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
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4. Scenario Analysis
4.1 Impact of a New Legislation Requiring Comprehensive Footnote Disclosure
Legislative Context: A forthcoming act mandates that all publicly listed companies disclose detailed footnotes covering regulatory compliance, environmental impact, and executive compensation in their annual reports. The disclosure format is standardized across all firms.
Implications for Data Collection:
- Data Volume Increase: The volume of text to be scraped will increase substantially. Automated pipelines must handle larger file sizes (e.g., PDF documents with extensive footnotes).
- Schema Expansion: The data model must incorporate new fields capturing the standardized footnote categories (regulatory, environmental, compensation). Each footnote may have a unique identifier and associated metadata (date, jurisdiction).
- Data Quality Assurance: Standardization reduces variability in formatting but introduces strict compliance requirements. Validation scripts should check adherence to the prescribed structure (e.g., mandatory presence of certain subheadings).
- Legal and Ethical Compliance: Since these footnotes may contain sensitive information about regulatory positions or compensation details, additional safeguards (access controls, data minimization) must be enforced.
3.2 Scenario B: Introduction of a New Data Source
Suppose the platform integrates a new external dataset providing ESG metrics (e.g., sustainability scores, carbon footprints). This source will deliver structured JSON files with its own schema.
Impact on Data Pipeline:
- Ingestion: Implement a dedicated data ingestion module that pulls or receives the JSON payloads via API calls or secure file transfer.
- Schema Mapping: Define a mapping layer translating the external JSON structure into the platform’s internal representation (e.g., converting `company_id` to the system’s UUID, normalizing date formats).
- Validation Rules: Extend validation logic to ensure that ESG metrics fall within acceptable ranges and adhere to business rules.
- Storage Layer: Persist the transformed data in appropriate database tables or NoSQL collections, ensuring referential integrity with existing company records.
Impact on Existing Features
- Data Retrieval: The API endpoint for fetching company details will now need to aggregate ESG metrics alongside existing financial and operational data. Care must be taken to maintain backward compatibility; clients expecting the original schema should receive it unchanged, while a new optional field or subresource exposes ESG data.
- Reporting & Analytics: Existing reports that compute financial ratios may now incorporate ESG indicators, potentially requiring updates to calculation logic and dashboards.
- User Interface (Front-End): The UI components displaying company profiles must be extended to show ESG scores. This might involve new tabs or widgets, ensuring they fit within the current layout without overwhelming users.
2. Refactoring Scenario
Original Design Decision:
The application’s domain model defines a `Customer` entity that contains an embedded collection of `Address` value objects directly as an array property (`addresses`). The data layer persists this by serializing the entire addresses array into a single JSON column in the relational database.
Refactoring to Use Separate Entities and Relations:
Rationale
- Normalization & Queryability: Storing addresses in separate rows allows efficient queries (e.g., find all customers residing at a specific city) without loading the whole array.
- Scalability: As the number of addresses per customer grows, serializing into JSON can lead to large blobs that degrade performance.
- Domain Flexibility: Addresses may become entities themselves (with lifecycle events, validation, etc.) and could be shared among multiple customers or other aggregates.
Steps
- Create Address Entity
class Address extends BaseEntity
private int $id;
private string $street;
private string $city;
private string $postalCode;
// getters/setters
```
- Modify Customer Entity
```php
class Customer extends BaseEntity
private Collection $addresses; // e.g., Doctrine ArrayCollection
public function addAddress(Address $address): void { ... }
public function removeAddress(int $id): void { ... }
```
- Update Repositories & Persistence Layer
- For rockchat.com ORM: define one-to-many relationship.
- For NoSQL or other persistence, ensure data model reflects embedded documents or references accordingly.
- Adjust Domain Services / Application Logic
- Ensure validation logic still applies (e.g., address uniqueness per customer).
- Refactor Tests
- Update integration/acceptance tests to use new API.
- Update Documentation / Client Code
- Provide migration guides or backward‑compatibility layer if needed.
- Run Full Regression Suite
- Deploy Incrementally
4. What If the Change Breaks an Invariant?
If the refactor inadvertently violates a key invariant (e.g., a product must always have a non‑negative stock), you should:
- Detect Early – Use property‑based tests to generate edge cases; failure indicates missing guard.
- Guard in Domain Model – Move invariant enforcement into constructors or factory methods so that invalid objects can never be created.
- Add Defensive Checks – In critical paths, verify preconditions before performing operations.
- Fail Fast – Throw a domain‑specific exception (e.g., `InvalidStockException`) instead of silently proceeding.
- Revert if Necessary – If the invariant cannot be restored easily, roll back to a previous stable version and fix the root cause.
3. Test Suite Skeleton
Below is a self‑contained skeleton that captures all core concepts: domain entities (`User`, `Product`), repository interfaces, service layer, and test classes for both unit tests (mocked dependencies) and integration tests (real in‑memory repositories). The code uses Java 17+ features such as records, sealed classes, and the modern JUnit 5 / Mockito APIs.
/ ==========================================================
1. Domain Layer – Entities & Value Objects
========================================================== /
package com.example.ecommerce.domain;
import java.time.Instant;
import java.util.UUID;
// --- Value Objects ----------------------------------------------------
public record UserId(UUID id) {}
public record ProductId(UUID id) {}
// --- Sealed base class for domain events ---------------------------------
public sealed interface DomainEvent permits OrderPlacedEvent, PaymentProcessedEvent
Instant occurredAt();
public final class OrderPlacedEvent implements DomainEvent
private final UserId userId;
private final List products;
public OrderPlacedEvent(UserId userId, List products) { ... }
@Override public Instant occurredAt() return Instant.now();
public final class PaymentProcessedEvent implements DomainEvent
private final UUID paymentId;
public PaymentProcessedEvent(UUID paymentId) { ... }
@Override public Instant occurredAt() return Instant.now();
// ------------------------------------------------------------
This code shows a clean, domain‑centric structure: domain types are in one package, infrastructure helpers (e.g., `JpaRepository`) in another, and application logic uses the domain without any persistence annotations. This aligns with your requirement to avoid mixing JPA into domain classes while still leveraging Spring Data repositories for persistence.
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Now, let's craft a minimal working example that demonstrates:
- A domain entity without* any JPA annotations.
- An interface that extends `JpaRepository` and can be injected via `@Autowired`.
- A repository bean that is used by a service to persist the entity.