The Australian Securities Exchange has supported Sirca since its inception, and has kindly made a broad array of its datasets available to us in order to help our mission to support academic research into the financial markets. These datasets include the feed of company announcements resulting from the ASX’s listing rules in the context of the continuous disclosure regime. As a result of this Sirca has developed an online database of ASX listed company announcements with an archive going back to 1992. This is available as an additional on-line resource called “Australian Company Announcements” for Sirca academic members and subscribers.
Sirca has developed software which exposes all available reference data for each disclosure, along with all the free text terms which appear in the bodies of the disclosures. Whilst the database is not as manually indexed as many of the offerings available from commercial providers it is nevertheless a very impressive resource in terms of enabling access to raw data.
As an example of how the database can be used, we were recently asked whether we could help with some research which was attempting to nail down the definitive listing of gold sector IPOs on the ASX for the last 5 years, along with a statement about the amount of capital raised.
Each company seeking access to the ASX needs to complete/submit a range of documentation and have these filed through the ASX ComNews service, these include prospectuses and information memoranda, along with standard ASX documentation. The ASX also issues official documents which indicate that an entity has been admitted to their official list. Using the way the ASX categorise these documents, combined with Sirca’s process of exposing the text of the disclosures it was possible to narrow down the overall list of IPOs to just those pertaining to the Gold sector. Furthermore the researcher was able to access the actual disclosures to cross check the amount of capital raised.
