Loughran-McDonald 10-X Summaries

Each row of Loughran-McDonald_10X_Summaries_1993-2025.csv describes one filing: identifiers (CIK, filing date, accession number, form type, company name, SIC and Fama-French 48-industry code) alongside precomputed word counts — N_Negative, N_Positive, N_Uncertainty, N_Litigious, N_StrongModal, N_WeakModal, N_Constraining, N_Complexity and N_Negation — plus document size fields. Because the counts are keyed by CIK and filing date, they merge directly onto a return panel, which is how the Loughran-McDonald line of work links 10-K tone to filing-period returns. The current vintage runs from 13 August 1993 to 31 December 2025 and is dominated by 10-Q (706,255) and 10-K (232,660) filings, with the remainder split across 10QSB, amendments, 10KSB and 10-K405.

This is not an open dataset. SRAF’s homepage states that “All software and data are provided on an ‘as is’ basis, without warranties, for non-commercial purposes”, while the companion Master Dictionary page describes that resource as “free for use in academic research” and directs commercial users to negotiate a licence by email. There is no LICENSE file — the terms are prose on two pages and are not worded identically, so read both before building anything commercial on it. No single citation is mandated either; the site points to different papers depending on which fields are used.

Hosting is Google Drive, so a naive curl returns the virus-scan interstitial rather than the CSV; gdown, or a second request carrying the returned confirm token, retrieves the ~188 MB file, and file IDs can change when a new vintage is posted. Related SRAF products include the 10-X Document Dictionaries (15.8 GB), cleaned and raw 10-X files, master index data, and 10-X header data. The underlying method is Loughran and McDonald, When Is a Liability Not a Liability? Textual Analysis, Dictionaries, and 10-Ks, Journal of Finance 66(1):35–65 (2011), which Crossref records at 5,258 citing works — the word lists it introduced are the de facto standard finance sentiment lexicon.