EDGAR Public Dissemination Service (PDS) System

EDGAR Public Dissemination Service (PDS) System is a private party online service that allows the public to quickly access financial filings submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The EDGAR PDS System, currently operated by Attain, LLC, has been operational since November 1998. It enables paying subscribers to retrieve corporate filings such as registration statements and periodic reports "as soon as reasonably feasible" after they are received by the SEC.

EDGAR stands for Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval System. The SEC is the central repository for all filings required under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934. As of mid-2018 there were well over 12 million filings; 3,000+ new documents are submitted each day. The SEC maintains the database free-of-charge to the public on its website. (Virtually all companies provide easy access to their SEC filings on their websites, but the SEC website centralizes all corporate documents submitted to the SEC.) The EDGAR PDS System run by Attain, LLC, a private company, however, receives the files from the SEC, organizes and compresses them, and then forwards the documents of interest through a firewall to subscribers via the internet. FASTCopy is the name of Attain's service. "Fast" is the reason why an investor would want to subscribe to the service even though the filings are available for free on the SEC website. Speed can give an investor an edge over other market participants, and the ability to see material information soon after it lands with the SEC may enable this investor to get a jump on stock-moving news before the market.