TSUMAMI OF RESIGNATIONS CONTAINED WITH IN K8 FILINGS ON EDGAR DATABASE

Posted by LordOfArcadia at: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread818860/pg1

Gab1159 has done a remarkable job of providing information regarding, what appears on the surface, to be a mass wave of resignations from the financial sector.

Massive Wave of Resignation (Part V): The New Bandwagon!

I urge you to read his work before preceding further in this thread.

If true, a huge exodus of the top brass from the financial sector would mean.... well, I am not sure, but it sure seems important. Upon reading his work, there was always the nagging thought in the back of my mind that, "Maybe there aren't more resignations, it just seems that way because either (a) the media are reporting on them more frequently or (b) we are just paying more attention." This thought has been raised in each of his updates, but nobody seemed to be able to quantify what is a reasonable number of resignations.

In the most recent update, I posted a comment, wherein I used the EBSCOhost Business Premier database to search for articles that contained the world "Resign". You can see my chart in Gab1159's thread, but saying that the results were inconclusive is being generous.

Then I had an idea. The Securities Exchange Act of 1934 requires that publicly traded companies must report to the SEC whenever a member of the Board or certain officers resign. Also, the SEC has a database named EDGAR that is open to the public. After a little research, I discovered that corporations must report said resignations on Form 8-K, Item 5.02. From there, it was a simple matter of searching only Form 8-Ks within a specific range of dates, and including the boolean search terms "Resigns" and "Resignation".

I felt this would at least offer us a baseline comparison to see if there is truly an uptick in resignations, or if it just appears that way. I think you will be interested in the results.
 

A few details I should point out. One, these results are not broken down by industrial sector, but encompass all "SICs" or Standard Industrial Classifications. Also, when dealing with such a large number of results, EDGAR gives an approximation on the number of filings. For example, in 2Q 2008 there may have been 1786 filings, but it gives me 1800 as the approximate result.


I must admit, when I started compiling the data, I did not believe I would find much. Possibly a slight upswing in the number of resignations, but I am simply blown away by the results.