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sec-mcp

audit

A Model Context Protocol server that gives Claude Desktop access to SEC EDGAR data — company filings, financial statements, and company info. No API key needed. It runs as a single native binary, with no Node, Python or Docker runtime behind it.

Why an MCP for this?

EDGAR is a set of public REST endpoints with no API key, and the documentation at sec.gov/search-filings/edgar-application-programming-interfaces is reasonable. So strictly speaking, an MCP isn't needed. What this wrapper buys you:

  1. Persistent User-Agent identity. SEC's fair-access policy requires a contact email in the User-Agent header; without one, requests get throttled or rejected. You don't want to re-paste your email into every prompt. The MCP stores it in a config file and stamps every request.

  2. Ticker → CIK resolution with caching. Every EDGAR endpoint is keyed by a zero-padded 10-digit CIK, not by ticker. Without a tool, each query would re-fetch the ~1 MB company_tickers.json and parse it from scratch. The MCP caches it for an hour.

  3. URL-construction quirks the docs are quiet about. The CY{period} prefix on the XBRL frames endpoint, the trailing I for instant concepts, the zero-padded CIK, the dash-stripped accession number in archive URLs. Easy to get wrong on the fly; encoded once in the tool.

  4. Response shaping. companyfacts responses are tens of MB and filings.recent is laid out as column-major parallel arrays. Both are usable, but a language model would burn a lot of context reformatting them. The MCP returns trimmed, row-shaped JSON.

  5. Discovery. With the MCP installed, the tool list itself tells Claude that it can query SEC filings, plus the common concept names. Without it, the model has to remember the endpoints exist.

If you only pull one or two filings a year, you don't need this — just give Claude the URL. At any higher volume, the wrapper pays for itself by turning "explain the URL grammar in every conversation" into "ask a natural question."

Related MCP server: @cyanheads/secedgar-mcp-server

Install

Install with Cargo (Rust 1.88 or newer):

cargo install sec-mcp

This compiles the rustls crypto backend (ring), which has a small amount of C, so you need a C compiler on the build host — but no cmake or assembler. macOS (Xcode Command Line Tools) and most desktop Linux distros already have one; a minimal Linux image may not — install it first, e.g. apt install build-essential on Debian/Ubuntu.

Configure Claude Desktop

Edit ~/Library/Application Support/Claude/claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sec-edgar": {
      "command": "sec-mcp",
      "args": []
    }
  }
}

Restart Claude Desktop.

First use

On your first SEC-related request Claude will explain that a contact email is required by the SEC EDGAR fair-access policy and ask your permission before proceeding. Your email is stored locally in ~/Library/Application Support/sec-mcp/config.toml and is only used in the HTTP User-Agent header sent to the SEC — it is not shared anywhere else.

Example prompts

  • "What are Apple's recent SEC filings?"

  • "Show me Tesla's annual revenue for the last 5 years"

  • "What was Microsoft's net income last quarter?"

  • "What industry is NVDA in according to the SEC?"

  • "What is Bridgewater Associates' CIK, and what has it filed recently?"

  • "Who owns more than 5% of Sonos, and has any of them filed a 13D?"

  • "How much did SpaceX raise in private rounds before it listed?"

  • "What were Bridgewater's ten largest positions last quarter?"

  • "Which 8-Ks were filed in the last hour, and what items did they report?"

  • "List every Schedule 13D filed last week"

  • "Show me Amazon's most recent 10-K filing"

  • "What tickers are listed on NYSE with 'energy' in the name?"

  • "What financial metrics does Apple report to the SEC?"

  • "What revenue guidance did Airbnb give in its Q1 2025 earnings release?"

  • "Summarize the risk factors in Tesla's latest 10-K"

  • "Which companies had the highest revenue in 2024?"

Tools

Tool

Description

sec_configure

First-run setup — saves your contact email

sec_lookup_cik

Resolve a ticker to its SEC CIK number, or search every EDGAR filer by name: fund managers, private issuers and individuals with no ticker included

sec_company_info

SIC code, industry, state of incorporation, fiscal year end, addresses

sec_recent_filings

Recent filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, etc.) with direct URLs — pages into older history automatically when a form-type filter needs it. With no ticker, the latest filings across all of EDGAR in real time, by form, with each filing's parties and an 8-K's items

sec_filing_text

The text of a filing document or exhibit (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, earnings release EX-99.1, proxy): its section index, any section by item, a search within it, or pages from any point. Given a filing, lists its documents by type

sec_full_text_search

Search the body text of filings since 2001, exhibits included — the only tool here that finds companies by what they said, rather than needing the company up front. Filter by form, ticker and date (amendments excluded unless asked for); every hit carries a direct document URL. With no query, lists filings by form and date instead, for any period since 2001

sec_insider_transactions

Forms 3, 4 and 5 — who bought or sold, when, how many shares and at what price, with transaction codes in plain language and footnotes resolved. Also Form 144, an insider's notice of a proposed sale, with any 10b5-1 plan date

sec_institutional_holdings

Form 13F — what an institutional manager (Berkshire, Bridgewater, BlackRock) holds each quarter, as positions with value, share of portfolio and voting authority, filterable by issuer. Issuers are named as filed, since 13F has no tickers

sec_private_offerings

Form D — money raised without a registered offering by private companies, funds and public companies: amount offered and sold, investors, the exemption claimed, brokers paid, and the officers, directors and promoters named

sec_beneficial_ownership

Schedules 13D and 13G — who owns more than 5% of a company, with voting and dispositive power, percent of class and, for a 13D, the holder's stated purpose. Given a holder's CIK, what that holder owns above 5%

sec_financial_concept

Historical financial data from XBRL (revenue, net income, EPS, assets…) — latest 20 facts by default, paging back into older history

sec_list_tickers

Search/list all SEC-registered tickers with exchange info — 50 per page, with paging

sec_company_facts

Discover all XBRL concepts (metrics) a company reports

sec_xbrl_frames

Cross-company comparison of a financial metric for a given period

Wherever a tool takes a ticker, it also takes a CIK (1163302, 0001163302 or CIK0001163302). SEC's ticker list holds only current tickers, so a company that was acquired, delisted or renamed is reachable only by CIK. sec_lookup_cik with name finds it, and full-text search hits and frames rows carry one.

Amendments (10-K/A and friends)

A form ending in /A amends one filed earlier. A 10-K/A is often not a complete annual report. Rule 12b-15 requires only the full text of each item being changed, so the most common amendment is Part III alone (directors, pay, ownership), filed when the proxy statement misses its 120-day window. Others add or fix exhibits. The rest are restatements that replace the original's figures. Apple's January 2010 10-K/A, for example, refiled fiscal 2009 under new revenue-recognition rules.

sec-mcp therefore excludes amendments unless you ask for them:

  • sec_financial_concept's annual/quarterly period filters match base forms only. The amended period is already covered by the original filing, and admitting both would report two facts for one period. Pass include_amendments: true to admit them when the restatement is what you want: Apple's fiscal 2009 revenue is $36.5B on the original 10-K and $42.9B on the 10-K/A. amended_facts then counts them.

  • sec_full_text_search with a form filter drops amendments. EDGAR itself does not: it filters on a filing's root form, so forms=10-K also returns 10-K/A. To get amendments, request the form directly (10-K/A), list both (10-K,10-K/A), or pass include_amendments: true. Any amendment returned is marked amendment: true.

Because that search filtering happens after EDGAR's, two parts of the response behave differently from a plain search:

  • total is still EDGAR's count, which includes the dropped amendments. It is flagged total_is_upper_bound, or total_is_approximate when it has also saturated at 10000. Each page reports amendments_excluded.

  • Paging must use next_offset. A page can return fewer than limit hits because amendments were skipped, so offset + returned would revisit them.

Common XBRL concepts for sec_financial_concept

Concept

What it is

Revenues

Total revenues

NetIncomeLoss

Net income / loss

EarningsPerShareBasic

Basic EPS

EarningsPerShareDiluted

Diluted EPS

Assets

Total assets

Liabilities

Total liabilities

StockholdersEquity

Shareholders' equity

OperatingIncomeLoss

Operating income / loss

CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue

Cash and equivalents

CommonStockSharesOutstanding

Shares outstanding

Development

cargo test          # offline; hits no network

There is also an opt-in live suite that drives the built server over stdio against the real SEC EDGAR APIs — the thing offline tests can't see, like EDGAR changing a response shape or a URL-construction quirk slipping through. It is skipped unless SEC_MCP_LIVE_EMAIL is set, which both opts in and supplies the contact email the fair-access policy requires (the address is read from the environment, never committed):

SEC_MCP_LIVE_EMAIL="you@example.com" cargo test --test live_smoke -- --nocapture

The suite runs sequentially through one server process, so it stays well within EDGAR's rate limit.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.md for details.

MCP registry

Ownership-verification token for the MCP registry (read from this crate's rendered README on crates.io):

Registry ownership token: mcp-name: io.github.brechanbech/sec-mcp

Releasing

A version is immutable once published — crates.io yanks, it does not delete, and a number is never reused — so the order matters:

  1. cargo test and cargo clippy --all-targets clean.

  2. Bump version in Cargo.toml.

  3. Bump version in server.json — both fields, the top-level one and the one under packages[]. Nothing enforces this: no script, no CI, no test reads the file, and it is the step that goes missing. This manifest stayed correct, but the registry entry did not: 0.5.0, 0.5.1 and 0.5.2 all shipped to crates.io while the registry still advertised 0.4.4, because step 6 was never run.

  4. Commit and push; let CI go green before publishing rather than after.

  5. cargo publish --dry-run, which compiles from the packaged copy and so catches a crate depending on a file it does not ship. Then cargo publish. Give both --target-dir target/package-verify. Without it, the verify build shares target/debug with ordinary builds under the same unit hash, so the binary's fingerprint ends up tracking the packaged src/main.rs rather than yours. Later edits then never rebuild target/debug/sec-mcp, and the offline stdio test in tests/live_smoke.rs silently runs the published code. If that has happened, cargo clean -p sec-mcp repairs it.

  6. Publish to the MCP registry, after crates.io and not before — the registry verifies the namespace by reading mcp-name from this crate's rendered README on crates.io, and server.json names a cargo version that must already exist there:

    mcp-publisher validate      # checks server.json against the live registry
    mcp-publisher login github  # interactive, for the io.github.brechanbech/* namespace
    mcp-publisher publish
  7. Create a release for the tag on both Codeberg and the GitHub mirror, with the version's CHANGELOG section as notes. A tag alone is not a release: Glama reads the GitHub mirror and reported "No stable releases found" while it carried every tag and no release.

Available Tools

14 tools
sec_beneficial_ownershipBeneficial Ownership (13D/13G)A
Read-only

Who owns more than 5% of a company: Schedules 13D and 13G, read from the filings themselves. Pass the company's ticker or CIK for the holders that have reported on it, or a holder's CIK (from sec_lookup_cik with 'name') for the companies that holder has reported on. Returns filings newest first, each with every reporting person's name, type (investment adviser, individual, …), sole and shared voting and dispositive power, aggregate shares and percent of class. A 13G is the short form for passive and institutional holders: it says which rule it is filed under, and 'exit_five_percent_or_less' marks a holder dropping to 5% or less. A 13D is filed by holders who may seek to influence control, and carries 'purpose' (Item 4: plans for the company, such as board seats or a sale) and 'source_of_funds' (Item 3). A 13G holder switching to a 13D is a signal worth noting. Amendments (/A) are included, since they are how holders report changes, so the newest filing per holder is their current position. Joint filers in one filing usually report the same shares: do not add their counts together. Filings before 18 December 2024 are HTML or text, listed with 'structured': false and a URL for sec_filing_text. Reads 5 filings by default and at most 10 per call; pass 'next_offset' back as 'offset' for older ones.

Inputs: ticker (required), limit, offset, form_type.

sec_company_factsCompany XBRL FactsA
Read-only

List the XBRL concepts (metrics) a company reports, to find the right name before querying values with sec_financial_concept. Each row gives the concept, its label and 'latest', the most recent period end with data: prefer a concept that is still current, since companies change tags (Palantir reports revenue as RevenueFromContractWithCustomerExcludingAssessedTax, not Revenues). Narrow with 'query' (matches name or label, e.g. 'revenue' or 'lease'). Returns 100 by default; 'matched' says how many fit, and passing 'next_offset' back as 'offset' fetches the next page. Descriptions are left out unless include_descriptions is set.

Inputs: ticker (required), limit, query, offset, +2 more.

sec_company_infoCompany InfoA
Read-only

Get general information about a public company from SEC EDGAR: SIC code, industry, state of incorporation, fiscal year end, addresses, and exchange listings.

Inputs: ticker (required).

sec_configureConfigure SEC Contact EmailA
Idempotent

REQUIRED SETUP: Register a contact email for SEC EDGAR API access. The SEC fair-access policy requires all automated clients to identify themselves with a contact address. Call this tool before using any other SEC tools. Ask the user for permission and their email address first.

Inputs: contact_email (required).

sec_filing_textFiling TextA
Read-only

Read the text of an SEC filing document: a 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, proxy statement, or an exhibit such as an earnings release (EX-99.1). HTML is converted to plain text, with each table row on one line and its cells joined by ' | '. Pass 'url' as sec_recent_filings or sec_full_text_search return it, or 'accession' with 'ticker'. A filing with no document named returns its document list with each document's type, which is how to find an 8-K's press release. Documents are long (a 10-K runs to about 400,000 characters), so: the first page lists the document's sections (e.g. 'Part I, Item 1A: Risk Factors') and the filing's other documents; 'section' reads one section; 'find' returns up to 10 matching passages with their offsets; 'offset' reads from any point. Pages are 20,000 characters by default; pass 'next_offset' back as 'offset' to continue. Text inside images is not extracted, and the response counts the images when there are any.

Inputs: url, find, limit, offset, +4 more.

sec_financial_conceptFinancial Concept HistoryA
Read-only

Get historical values for a financial concept from SEC XBRL data. Returns the most recent 20 facts by default (in chronological order); 'total_facts' says how many exist, and passing 'next_offset' back as 'offset' pages further into the past. The 'annual' and 'quarterly' period filters leave out amendments (10-K/A), which restate periods the original already reported; pass include_amendments: true to admit them, and 'amended_facts' counts them. Common concepts: 'Revenues', 'NetIncomeLoss', 'EarningsPerShareBasic', 'Assets', 'StockholdersEquity', 'OperatingIncomeLoss', 'CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue'.

Inputs: ticker (required), concept (required), limit, offset, +3 more.

sec_insider_transactionsInsider TransactionsA
Read-only

Get insider transactions (SEC Forms 3, 4 and 5) for a company by ticker — who bought or sold, when, how many shares and at what price, with each insider's name and role. Reads the filings themselves, so results include the SEC transaction code expanded into plain language and any explanatory footnotes: this matters because a 'F' is shares withheld to cover tax on vesting, not a market sale. Form 3 reports initial holdings rather than transactions, so its facts appear under 'holdings'; a Form 3 from an insider who owns nothing yet has empty holdings and 'no_securities_owned': true. With form_type '144', returns Form 144 notices instead: an affiliate's notice of a proposed sale, filed when the order is placed and before the Form 4 that reports the executed trade. Each gives the seller and their relationship to the company, the shares and market value to be sold, the broker and approximate date, how the shares were acquired, any Rule 10b5-1 plan adoption date, and sales in the past three months. A notice is an intent to sell, not a completed sale. Reads 5 filings by default and at most 10 per call; pass 'next_offset' back as 'offset' for older ones.

Inputs: ticker (required), limit, offset, form_type.

sec_institutional_holdingsInstitutional Holdings (13F)A
Read-only

What an institutional manager holds: its quarterly Form 13F holdings report, read from the filing. Managers with $100 million or more in US-listed equities file one within 45 days of each quarter end. Pass the manager's CIK (find it with sec_lookup_cik's 'name', e.g. 'Bridgewater Associates'), or a ticker for a listed manager such as Berkshire Hathaway. Returns the latest report by default, or the one for 'report_period'; positions are aggregated by CUSIP, class and put/call across the table's rows and sorted by value, largest first, each with issuer, class, CUSIP, value in dollars, percent of the portfolio, shares (or principal), voting authority and investment discretion. 'query' narrows to an issuer by part of its name or by CUSIP: one call answers 'does Berkshire hold Apple'. Issuers are named as filed ('APPLE INC') and the table has no tickers, because CUSIP identifiers are licensed. This answers what one manager holds, not who holds a stock: for holders above 5% use sec_beneficial_ownership. 13F covers long positions in US-listed equities, options and some convertibles only, not shorts, cash or foreign shares, and may omit positions under confidential treatment. Amendments for the period are listed, not merged. Pages of 25 by default, at most 100; pass 'next_offset' back as 'offset'.

Inputs: ticker (required), limit, query, offset, +1 more.

sec_list_tickersList TickersA
Read-only

List all active SEC-registered tickers with exchange info, optionally filtered by search query. Useful for finding a company's ticker symbol or seeing what's listed on a particular exchange. Returns 50 by default; 'matched' says how many fit the query, and passing 'next_offset' back as 'offset' fetches the next page.

Inputs: limit, query, offset.

sec_lookup_cikLook Up CIKA
Read-only

Look up the SEC CIK (Central Index Key) by ticker or by name. With 'ticker', the ticker is matched exactly, ignoring case, against SEC's list of active tickers, which is fetched once and cached for an hour, so repeat lookups make no further SEC request. Returns one CIK, zero-padded to 10 digits, with a link to the company's EDGAR page; share classes such as GOOG and GOOGL map to the same CIK. An unknown ticker is an error, not a guess. Given a CIK as 'ticker', this returns the company's name and current tickers, which confirms whose it is. With 'name', this searches every EDGAR filer, including those with no ticker: fund managers such as Bridgewater, private issuers, delisted or acquired companies and individual insiders. It returns up to 10 ranked matches, each with name, CIK and any tickers. Words match as prefixes in any order, but abbreviations do not expand ('United States Steel', not 'US Steel'), and people are filed surname first ('Buffett Warren'). Every tool here accepts a CIK in place of a ticker, so a name match reaches a company's filings even without a ticker. The other tools take tickers directly, so call this only when you need the CIK itself or have only a name.

Inputs: name, ticker.

sec_private_offeringsPrivate Offerings (Form D)A
Read-only

Money raised without a registered offering: Form D notices, filed by private companies, funds and public companies within 15 days of a first sale. Most filers have no ticker, so find the CIK with sec_lookup_cik's 'name' first. Returns filings newest first, each with the issuer (entity type, jurisdiction, state), industry group (for a fund, its type such as hedge, private equity or venture capital), revenue or net-asset range (often 'Decline to Disclose'), the exemption claimed in plain language (Rule 506(b), 506(c), Investment Company Act 3(c)(1) or 3(c)(7)), the date of first sale, securities offered, total offering amount, amount sold and amount remaining (a fund's open-ended offering reads 'Indefinite'), number of investors, sales commissions and finder's fees, brokers paid to sell it, and the executive officers, directors and promoters named. Amendments (D/A) are included: funds file one every year, and the newest filing carries the running total. A Form D reports a raise, not the price or valuation. Reads 5 filings by default and at most 10 per call; pass 'next_offset' back as 'offset' for older ones.

Inputs: ticker (required), limit, offset.

sec_recent_filingsRecent FilingsA
Read-only

Get recent SEC filings (10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, etc.) for a company by ticker symbol, or, with no ticker, the latest filings across all of EDGAR. For a company: returns the most recent filings first; when a form_type filter is given, older history is paged in automatically if recent filings don't satisfy the requested limit. With no ticker: reads EDGAR's real-time latest-filings feed, which reaches back about two business days, newest first, filtered by form_type ('8-K', 'SCHEDULE 13D', '4'; amendments match too). Each row is one filing with its acceptance time, its parties (a Form 4's reporting person and issuer, a 13D's filers and subject company, each with CIK and role), an 8-K's items, and the filing's index URL for sec_filing_text. Pass 'next_offset' back as 'offset' for older pages. For filings by form further back than the feed reaches, use sec_full_text_search with 'forms' and a date range and no query.

Inputs: limit, offset, ticker, form_type.

sec_xbrl_framesCross-Company XBRL FramesA
Read-only

Cross-company comparison — get a specific financial metric for all companies in a given period. For example, compare revenue across all filers for 2024. Returns entries sorted by value, largest first, 20 by default; 'total' says how many filers reported, and passing 'next_offset' back as 'offset' pages down the ranking. Note: 'instant' concepts (balance-sheet items measured at a point in time, e.g. Assets, Liabilities, StockholdersEquity, CashAndCashEquivalentsAtCarryingValue, CommonStockSharesOutstanding) require instant=true with a quarterly period. 'Duration' concepts (flow items measured over a period, e.g. Revenues, NetIncomeLoss, OperatingIncomeLoss, EarningsPerShareBasic) require instant=false (the default).

Inputs: period (required), concept (required), unit, limit, +3 more.

Tool Schema Changelog

Recent tool additions, removals, and schema changes observed during successful MCP inspections.

Loading tool schema changelog…

    TDQS

    A4.2/5.0

    Scored across 14 tools

    Disambiguation4/5

    Each tool has a clearly distinct target: CIK lookup, ticker listing, company info, concept discovery, concept values, cross-company frames, filing lists, filing text, full-text search, and four ownership/filing-type readers. The only real overlaps are sec_recent_filings vs sec_full_text_search-without-query (both enumerate filings by form/date) and sec_lookup_cik-name vs sec_list_tickers (both search names), but the descriptions explicitly cross-reference and differentiate these cases.

    Naming Consistency4/5

    Everything is snake_case under a uniform 'sec_' prefix, which is easy to scan. Deviations are minor: some names are verb_noun (sec_lookup_cik, sec_list_tickers, sec_configure), some are noun phrases (sec_insider_transactions, sec_beneficial_ownership), and one is adjective_noun (sec_recent_filings), but the convention remains readable and predictable.

    Tool Count5/5

    Fourteen tools for a broad EDGAR domain (reference data, XBRL financials, filing retrieval, and four distinct filing types) is well within a healthy range. Each tool maps to a distinct capability with no filler or wrapper duplication.

    Completeness4/5

    The surface covers the lifecycle well: setup, CIK/ticker resolution, company metadata, XBRL concept discovery and values, cross-company comparison, filing lists and full text retrieval, plus 13D/G, 13F, Forms 3/4/5/144 and Form D readers, each with paging and amendment handling. Gaps are minor but real: no reverse 'who holds this stock' query from 13F data, and no structured access to registration statements (S-1) or proxy compensation tables beyond raw filing text.

    Maintenance

    ActivityActive
    ResponsivenessNo recent community issues

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