SEC will improve investor access to key fund data
Earlier this autumn the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted a final rule designed to make it easier for investors and shareholders to access key information. Keen readers will remember the announcement, and this week leading law firm Kirkland & Ellis have published a new report summarising the requirements and results of the rule.
The rule requires open-end funds to prepare streamlined concise, visually engaging, and, crucially, Inline XBRL tagged annual and semi-annual reports. The measure is designed to tackle the difficulty of comprehending and comparing typical shareholder reports, which historically have often been in excess of 100 pages long. The rule is particularly targeted towards helping retail investors make informed decisions.
We fully support the efforts of the SEC to reduce the complexity of parsing disclosures and provide more useful, tailored information for investors. By ensuring that these new, streamlined semi-annual reports are tagged using Inline XBRL, the SEC has boosted the availability of both human-readable and machine-readable data for investor analysis. A positive step forward for data access that we would like to see rolled out elsewhere. Other jurisdictions should take note!
