OpenFloat Specification

Home / OpenFloat / OpenFloat Specification

OpenFloat

The Open Source Eye on Every Share

Overview

OpenFloat is an open-source financial transparency, securities intelligence, and market accountability platform designed to monitor share distribution, ownership, trading activity, and settlement information across every publicly traded company in global financial markets.

The platform establishes a comprehensive, continuously updated database of corporate share structures, including authorized shares, issued shares, outstanding shares, public float, institutional ownership, insider holdings, securities lending, short interest, and available settlement information. By consolidating regulatory filings, exchange data, corporate disclosures, and other verifiable financial records, OpenFloat aims to provide an independently auditable picture of equity market activity.

OpenFloat is designed to identify potential phantom share activity, unexplained share distribution discrepancies, persistent failures to deliver, unusual short-selling patterns, suspicious market movements, and potential market manipulation. It connects these findings with documented brokerage relationships, clearinghouse activity, institutional ownership, corporate disclosures, and major market events.

The platform will provide investors, researchers, journalists, regulators, and legal professionals with transparent market intelligence, historical evidence preservation, investigative tools, and analytical resources to identify potential investor harm and support appropriate regulatory action, restitution, and securities litigation.

Core Modules

Global Public Company Registry

Maintain a comprehensive database of publicly traded companies across global stock exchanges.
Assign standardized company and security identifiers, including ticker symbols, CUSIP, ISIN, LEI, and SEC CIK where available.
Track company names, historical names, ticker changes, exchange listings, and corporate reorganizations.
Document parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, and corporate ownership relationships.
Track market capitalization, enterprise valuation, and publicly reported financial information.
Monitor initial public offerings, secondary listings, delistings, suspensions, and relistings.
Track foreign issuers, American Depositary Receipts, and dual-listed securities.
Maintain historical company profiles and corporate event timelines.
Identify inactive, bankrupt, dissolved, and reorganized companies.
Support global company searches, filtering, and classification.
Maintain relationships between securities, issuers, and corporate entities.
Provide permanent historical records of company identification changes.

Share Issuance and Distribution Intelligence

Track authorized shares, issued shares, outstanding shares, and publicly available float figures.
Maintain historical share distribution records.
Document new share issuances and secondary offerings.
Track private placements and registered direct offerings.
Monitor restricted shares, insider holdings, and institutional ownership disclosures.
Track employee stock options, warrants, convertible securities, and preferred stock conversions.
Monitor stock splits, reverse splits, buybacks, and share retirements.
Identify changes in outstanding shares and public float.
Calculate historical dilution and changes in ownership percentages.
Compare corporate filings against exchange and market information.
Identify unexplained changes in reported share counts.
Distinguish authorized shares from issued and outstanding shares.
Track changes in beneficial ownership disclosures.
Maintain historical share distribution snapshots.
Identify discrepancies between corporate capitalization disclosures and other available market information.
Generate company-specific share distribution reports.
Preserve source documentation for every recorded share count.

Phantom Share and Synthetic Exposure Intelligence

Monitor potential discrepancies between reported issued shares and observable trading and settlement activity.
Identify unusual patterns of persistent failures to deliver.
Track reported short interest and changes in short exposure.
Analyze publicly available securities lending and borrowing information.
Identify indicators associated with potential naked short selling.
Monitor synthetic exposure created through options and other derivatives.
Identify unusual increases in reported short exposure.
Compare reported public float against available ownership and settlement information.
Track potential duplicate economic exposure arising from securities lending arrangements.
Analyze trading volume relative to reported outstanding shares and public float.
Identify recurring settlement failures involving individual securities.
Monitor discrepancies across multiple reporting periods.
Maintain historical phantom share investigation records.
Generate anomaly alerts with supporting source documentation.
Assign confidence classifications to potential discrepancies.
Distinguish verified share issuance from synthetic exposure, unsettled obligations, and calculated estimates.
Provide reproducible analytical methods for evaluating potential phantom share activity.

Brokerage and Market Participant Intelligence

Maintain a comprehensive registry of registered broker-dealers.
Identify brokerage parent companies, subsidiaries, affiliates, and corporate relationships.
Track clearing brokers, introducing brokers, and carrying firms.
Map documented relationships between brokerages and clearinghouses.
Monitor publicly disclosed short-selling activity.
Track available securities lending disclosures.
Associate reported settlement discrepancies with relevant market participants where information is available.
Monitor brokerage regulatory histories and enforcement actions.
Track publicly documented compliance violations and disciplinary proceedings.
Identify recurring patterns of market participation.
Compare brokerage activity across multiple publicly traded companies.
Track changes in brokerage ownership and corporate structure.
Generate brokerage-specific activity profiles.
Maintain documented evidence supporting brokerage-related findings.
Distinguish confirmed participation from inferred relationships and investigative hypotheses.

Clearinghouse and Settlement Intelligence

Maintain a registry of central clearing agencies and securities settlement organizations.
Monitor publicly available DTCC and NSCC information.
Track published failures-to-deliver information.
Monitor settlement cycles and regulatory changes.
Analyze settlement obligations and netting practices using available information.
Identify recurring settlement abnormalities.
Monitor publicly disclosed clearing member relationships.
Track published collateral and margin requirement changes.
Monitor clearinghouse risk disclosures.
Identify periods of unusual settlement stress.
Compare settlement activity with trading volume and outstanding share information.
Maintain historical clearing and settlement event records.
Document regulatory developments affecting securities settlement.
Generate clearinghouse-specific investigative reports.

Market Manipulation and Price Movement Intelligence

Monitor daily, weekly, monthly, and intraday price movements where available.
Track opening prices, closing prices, highs, lows, and trading volume.
Identify unusual price spikes and sudden declines.
Detect abnormal volume surges.
Calculate trading volume relative to reported public float.
Identify unusual price and volume divergence.
Compare market movements against sector and broader market benchmarks.
Correlate price movements with reported short interest and failures to deliver.
Analyze market behavior surrounding corporate announcements.
Monitor trading patterns surrounding earnings releases.
Identify potential pump-and-dump indicators.
Detect unusual volatility surrounding major corporate events.
Identify recurring patterns of rapid price appreciation followed by significant declines.
Compare trading behavior across similarly situated companies.
Maintain historical market movement records.
Generate company-specific market anomaly reports.

Cross-Market Correlation Intelligence

Compare trading activity across major global stock exchanges.
Identify correlated price movements among unrelated publicly traded companies.
Detect synchronized unusual trading volume.
Compare securities with shared institutional ownership.
Identify companies with overlapping brokerage and clearing relationships.
Monitor sector-wide and market-wide price disruptions.
Compare short-interest changes with subsequent market movements.
Analyze trading activity surrounding major economic announcements.
Monitor market behavior during periods of financial stress.
Identify recurring patterns across multiple securities.
Generate cross-company correlation reports.
Provide interactive market-wide comparison tools.
Distinguish statistical correlation from evidence of coordinated activity.

Institutional Ownership and Insider Intelligence

Track institutional ownership through available regulatory disclosures.
Monitor SEC Form 13F filings.
Track Schedule 13D and Schedule 13G disclosures.
Monitor insider transactions through SEC Forms 3, 4, and 5.
Track executive compensation involving equity awards.
Identify significant institutional ownership changes.
Compare reported institutional ownership with historical share counts.
Monitor executive transactions surrounding major corporate announcements.
Identify unusual patterns in insider trading disclosures.
Track activist investor positions.
Maintain historical institutional ownership timelines.
Analyze ownership concentration.
Track publicly disclosed changes in beneficial ownership.
Generate institutional ownership comparison reports.

Corporate Financial Integrity and Disclosure Monitoring

Monitor SEC 10-K, 10-Q, and 8-K filings.
Track amended financial statements and accounting restatements.
Identify inconsistencies in reported financial information.
Monitor revenue recognition and accounting adjustments.
Track executive compensation and related-party transactions.
Identify significant changes in auditor relationships.
Monitor auditor resignations and accounting disputes.
Track material weaknesses in internal financial controls.
Identify discrepancies between reported earnings and subsequent restatements.
Monitor corporate debt and convertible financing arrangements.
Track potential dilution associated with financing agreements.
Identify unusual financial transactions requiring additional scrutiny.
Monitor corporate governance disclosures.
Preserve historical versions of corporate filings.
Generate corporate financial integrity reports.

Major Event and Market Correlation Intelligence

Maintain chronological event timelines for every tracked company.
Record earnings announcements and financial disclosures.
Track mergers, acquisitions, and corporate restructuring.
Monitor new share issuances and financing announcements.
Identify major institutional ownership changes.
Compare trading activity before, during, and after corporate announcements.
Identify unusual price movements preceding significant announcements.
Analyze sudden declines following positive corporate disclosures.
Correlate market movements with reported settlement discrepancies.
Track trading activity surrounding regulatory investigations.
Monitor significant executive departures and leadership changes.
Identify recurring market patterns surrounding corporate events.
Compare major events across multiple companies.
Generate event-based market investigation reports.

Market Anomaly Detection and Intelligence Engine

Establish historical trading baselines for every tracked security.
Detect deviations from normal trading behavior.
Identify unusual volume-to-float ratios.
Monitor turnover relative to reported outstanding shares.
Detect recurring settlement anomalies.
Compare price movements against market and sector benchmarks.
Identify statistically significant changes in trading patterns.
Detect synchronized anomalies across multiple securities.
Generate anomaly severity classifications.
Provide confidence scores and explainable detection methods.
Maintain historical anomaly records.
Support independent analytical models.
Allow researchers to submit additional detection methodologies.
Preserve the inputs and calculations behind each anomaly.
Distinguish statistical anomalies from verified misconduct.
Support human review before publishing investigative conclusions.

Investor Exposure and Shareholder Impact Analysis

Support voluntary investor registration.
Allow investors to securely submit brokerage statements and transaction histories.
Support transaction history imports from commonly used financial document formats.
Record purchase dates, sale dates, quantities, and transaction prices.
Calculate individual investment exposure during identified anomaly periods.
Compare transaction histories against historical market movements.
Estimate potential economic damages using documented methodologies.
Analyze potential dilution effects.
Identify potentially affected investor groups.
Support aggregated shareholder impact analysis.
Generate individual investor exposure reports.
Maintain investor-controlled evidence records.
Allow authorized sharing of records with legal representatives.
Preserve calculation assumptions and supporting documentation.
Clearly distinguish estimated exposure from legally established damages.

Class Action and Legal Evidence Preservation

Create company-specific investigative records.
Maintain chronological records of market anomalies.
Preserve original regulatory filings and source documents.
Record retrieval timestamps and publication dates.
Generate cryptographic hashes for preserved evidence.
Maintain append-only audit logs.
Record changes to investigative findings and analytical conclusions.
Preserve original data alongside normalized and calculated datasets.
Document the methodology supporting every investigative alert.
Track potentially affected investor populations.
Maintain investor-submitted evidence with appropriate authorization.
Generate downloadable investigative evidence packages.
Create attorney-ready company investigation reports.
Track securities class action announcements and filings.
Monitor regulatory investigations and enforcement proceedings.
Track settlements, judgments, dismissals, and appeals.
Support legal review and evidence examination workflows.
Maintain chain-of-custody documentation.
Export structured records for independent forensic analysis.
Preserve historical versions of investigative reports.
Support the documentation of potential claims against brokerages, clearinghouses, market participants, and corporate officers when supported by evidence.

Public Transparency Dashboard

Provide a comprehensive global market overview.
Maintain a searchable directory of publicly traded companies.
Display company-specific share distribution dashboards.
Visualize historical outstanding share counts.
Display public float and ownership disclosures.
Provide failures-to-deliver historical charts.
Display reported short-interest trends.
Visualize price and volume correlations.
Provide brokerage and clearinghouse relationship maps.
Display market anomaly heatmaps.
Provide cross-company event comparisons.
Display institutional ownership timelines.
Maintain corporate disclosure timelines.
Display publicly documented regulatory enforcement actions.
Provide historical market activity comparisons.
Support downloadable reports and datasets.
Provide public access to non-confidential information without requiring registration.

Data Verification and Source Intelligence

Integrate publicly available SEC EDGAR information.
Retrieve SEC company submissions and filing archives.
Import published SEC failures-to-deliver datasets.
Integrate FINRA published market and short-interest information.
Retrieve available exchange-provided market statistics.
Monitor DTCC and NSCC public disclosures.
Track corporate investor relations announcements.
Import institutional ownership filings.
Monitor regulatory enforcement records.
Integrate historical market pricing and volume information.
Monitor news and corporate announcement feeds.
Maintain source attribution for every imported record.
Validate imported data against original sources.
Detect duplicate records.
Identify conflicting disclosures.
Monitor data freshness and reporting delays.
Preserve historical source versions.
Support manual verification and researcher review.
Clearly identify unavailable, restricted, estimated, and incomplete information.

Public Data API and Developer Access

Provide public REST API access.
Support structured company and security identifier searches.
Provide share distribution endpoints.
Provide historical market data endpoints.
Provide anomaly and correlation endpoints.
Provide brokerage and clearinghouse registry endpoints.
Provide regulatory filing endpoints.
Provide evidence verification endpoints.
Support bulk historical data downloads.
Provide developer documentation.
Support API authentication and rate limiting.
Allow community-developed integrations.
Support third-party analytical tools and plugins.
Provide versioned API documentation.
Maintain transparent API usage policies.

Automated Alerts and Notifications

Notify users of significant share issuance changes.
Alert users to unusual float changes.
Monitor unusual failures-to-deliver activity.
Notify users of short-interest reporting changes.
Identify unusual price and volume movements.
Alert users to potential pump-and-dump indicators.
Monitor corporate disclosure changes.
Notify users of insider transaction disclosures.
Track institutional ownership changes.
Monitor brokerage enforcement announcements.
Generate cross-company anomaly notifications.
Support customized company watchlists.
Provide daily, weekly, and monthly intelligence reports.
Maintain historical alert records.
Allow users to configure notification preferences.

Optional Plugin Modules

Advanced AI Market Intelligence

Provide AI-assisted identification of unusual trading patterns.
Support natural language searches across the company database.
Summarize complex SEC filings and corporate disclosures.
Identify relationships among companies, brokers, and clearing participants.
Compare historical market events.
Generate automated anomaly investigation summaries.
Identify recurring patterns across multiple companies.
Provide explainable AI findings with source citations.
Support interactive research conversations.
Generate investigative research briefs.
Require human review before publishing AI-generated allegations or conclusions.

Brokerage Relationship Network Mapping

Provide interactive brokerage ownership maps.
Visualize parent companies and subsidiaries.
Map documented clearing broker relationships.
Visualize publicly disclosed securities lending relationships.
Overlay regulatory enforcement histories.
Compare market participation across multiple companies.
Track historical relationship changes.
Identify frequently connected market participants.
Generate brokerage network analysis reports.

Investor Evidence Submission Portal

Provide secure investor registration.
Support voluntary brokerage statement submissions.
Import investor transaction histories.
Support CSV and spreadsheet uploads.
Extract transaction information from submitted documents.
Provide investor privacy controls.
Generate individual portfolio exposure analyses.
Verify document integrity.
Allow investor-controlled evidence sharing.
Support authorized attorney access.
Maintain submission histories and audit logs.

Regulatory and Litigation Monitoring

Monitor SEC enforcement actions.
Track FINRA disciplinary proceedings.
Monitor DOJ securities fraud prosecutions.
Track state securities regulator announcements.
Monitor securities class action filings.
Track litigation status and procedural developments.
Monitor settlement announcements and judgments.
Index publicly available court documents.
Support legal precedent research.
Maintain company-specific litigation histories.
Generate regulatory and litigation summaries.

Share Distribution Reconciliation Laboratory

Compare reported shares outstanding across filing periods.
Reconcile corporate share counts against available institutional ownership disclosures.
Compare reported public float against trading volume.
Analyze stock splits and reverse splits.
Identify unexplained share distribution changes.
Track convertible securities and warrant exercises.
Model potential dilution scenarios.
Generate detailed reconciliation reports.
Allow independent verification of calculations.
Preserve historical reconciliation results.

Historical Market Reconstruction

Reconstruct historical share distribution snapshots.
Recreate historical price and volume timelines.
Compare historical short-interest disclosures.
Overlay available failures-to-deliver information.
Map historical corporate announcements.
Identify periods of unusual trading behavior.
Compare historical events across companies.
Preserve reconstructed investigative timelines.
Export historical market reconstructions for forensic examination.

Public Research and Collaboration

Provide researcher accounts and contributor profiles.
Support community-submitted investigations.
Enable independent anomaly verification.
Support peer-reviewed analytical reports.
Provide research discussion spaces.
Support reproducible analytical notebooks.
Publish community research datasets.
Maintain contributor attribution.
Support version-controlled investigation records.
Allow researchers to challenge and correct findings.
Provide documented dispute resolution processes.

Institutional and Professional Research Portal

Provide advanced company screening.
Support multi-company comparisons.
Enable historical market anomaly analysis.
Compare institutional ownership.
Analyze documented brokerage relationships.
Generate downloadable forensic reports.
Support custom analytical queries.
Provide bulk data exports.
Maintain collaborative research workspaces.
Support professional investigator access controls.

Advanced Securities Lending Intelligence

Track publicly disclosed securities lending information.
Monitor available borrow rates and utilization metrics.
Analyze reported lending volume.
Track available short-sale volume data.
Identify unusual changes in borrowing costs.
Compare lending activity with short-interest changes.
Analyze recurring securities lending patterns.
Identify potential conflicts between reported lending activity and other disclosures.
Maintain historical securities lending records.

Market-Wide Risk and Systemic Exposure Intelligence

Monitor market-wide settlement abnormalities.
Identify simultaneous anomalies across multiple securities.
Compare market-wide failures-to-deliver trends.
Analyze exposure concentration across institutions.
Identify periods of unusual market-wide volatility.
Track liquidity disruptions.
Monitor clearinghouse risk disclosures.
Analyze correlations between major financial institutions and market events.
Generate systemic market risk reports.
Provide historical comparisons of market stress events.

News and Public Information Intelligence

Aggregate publicly available financial news.
Monitor corporate press releases.
Track regulatory announcements.
Identify news events associated with unusual market movements.
Compare news publication timestamps against market activity.
Identify contradictory corporate statements.
Track changes in company narratives over time.
Provide source-linked news timelines.
Support historical news and market event comparisons.

Advanced Reporting and Evidence Export

Generate company-specific market intelligence reports.
Generate brokerage activity reports.
Generate clearinghouse investigation reports.
Produce historical share distribution comparisons.
Create investor exposure summaries.
Generate potential class action research packages.
Export supporting source documents.
Include evidence hashes and retrieval timestamps.
Provide machine-readable evidence exports.
Preserve analytical assumptions and calculation methods.
Support customized reporting periods.
Maintain version histories of generated reports.

Specification Branding License (SBL)

Standard

Fully AGPL-3.0+ compliant system.
Copyleft enforced for network deployments.
Required attribution:
- Roxanne Ardary
- https://www.roxanneardary.com/

Optional

Specification Branding License (SBL)
- Attribution-free commercial deployment.
- Pricing based on scale, usage, and deployment scope.
- https://roxanneardary.com/openfloat/

License & Notice Requirements

OpenFloat is released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0+).

By contributing to any Open Arsenal project, you agree that your contributions will also be released under this license.

Please note the following:

All contributions must comply with the AGPL-3.0+ terms.
Under Section 7 of the license, all redistributions, forks, and derivative works must preserve attribution to: Roxanne Ardary and roxanneardary.com.
OpenFloat specifications are free to use with attribution. A Specification Branding License can be negotiated upon request.
The project’s notice.md file tracks attribution requirements and contributor acknowledgments. Any update that adds new contributors or modifies attribution should also update notice.md.
When submitting a pull request, ensure that any new files maintain the attribution headers where applicable.
Network-deployed versions of this software must also remain fully AGPL-3.0+ compliant, including exposure of source code modifications when applicable under the license.

For full legal details, please refer to the AGPL-3.0+ license and the project’s notice.md file.

Notice – OpenFloat

Attribution Requirement: Under Section 7 of the AGPL 3.0+ license, all redistributions, forks, and derivative works, including network-deployed versions of this project, must provide attribution to Roxanne Ardary and roxanneardary.com.

Contributors

This file tracks contributors and their specific contributions to the project.

Roxanne Ardary, roxanneardary.com – November 5, 2026
Created the repository for OpenFloat. Established the project concept and specification for an open-source financial transparency and market intelligence platform tracking global share distribution, potential phantom share activity, brokerage relationships, market anomalies, settlement irregularities, and investor accountability.
Add other contributors here – [Date]
[Describe contribution in one sentence]

License – OpenFloat

This repository is licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 or later (AGPL-3.0+).

Key Points:

You are free to use, modify, and distribute the code.
All redistributions, forks, and derivative works or network-deployed versions must also be licensed under AGPL-3.0+ and provide attribution to Roxanne Ardary and roxanneardary.com as required under Section 7 of the license.
The software is provided “as is,” without warranty of any kind.

For the full license text, see GNU AGPL-3.0 License.