Free Transcripts Conference Calls

Free transcripts on conference calls in the financial industry came about as a result of federal legislation in October of 2000. The U.S. Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) passed its fair disclosure rule. This said that public companies must make information readily available to the public simultaneous with its providing it to securities analysts. One result of this ruling is that anyone is allowed to listen to the conference calls on quarterly earnings, and retrieve free transcripts.

While valuable investment information can be gathered by listening to or reading free transcripts from these conference calls, the process is a hassle because the SEC disclaimer that precedes the actual conference calls runs about 20 minutes. These free transcripts on the conference calls that are accessed on the Web are more advantageous than sitting in on the event itself. They can be read at the leisure of the reader, and a potential investor can search important keywords, cut and paste the parts of the free transcripts they need and convert the conference call transcript in to documents or spreadsheets.

When the fair disclosure rule was first passed one ingenious financial firm moved quickly to lock up the market on transcript services, charging investors or potential investors as much as $8000 annually for its transcript service. Finally in January of 2006 a small start up began offering free transcripts for these financial conference calls. The firm was a stock market and personal finance network of blogs. Its free transcripts for conference calls were first offered to as many as 400 leading public firms.

This SEC decision to democratize the stock market industry has resulted in the public’s free access to transcripts on conference calls of many types as vendors follow suit. The stock market free transcript services focus on providing the information no later than six hours after the conference calls re over so that no one has an advantage over another. With this service individual investors can see, listen to and study the free transcripts before the stock market opens the following day.

The free transcripts services on conference calls should be a valuable service to stock market junkies and others who want to invest in other firms, whether they are individual investors or venture capitalists.