Merger Communications (Rule 425)

Every communication filed under Rule 425 while a merger, acquisition or de-SPAC is pending - press releases, investor decks, employee memos and executed merger agreements. Each row is a dated pair: who filed it and which company it is about, with a CIK, SIC and file number on each side, plus the 333- registration the deal is being registered on.

edgar_merger_communications - the dataset name to pass to the Obscura API.

What one row means

One communication filed under **Securities Act Rule 425** - a press release, investor deck, employee memo or executed agreement published while a merger, acquisition or de-SPAC is pending. The prose is not the point and is not stored. The SGML header names **who filed it** and **which company it is about**, with a CIK on each, so every row is a *dated, directed communication* between two identified registrants - the only place on EDGAR where a proposed combination is stated as a relation between two CIKs on a specific day, without opening a single document. Roughly 41 % of communications name two different parties (an acquirer → target edge); the rest are a company announcing its own deal, which `is_self_filed` says explicitly rather than leaving a consumer to infer it from two equal CIKs. See `docs/datasets/edgar_merger_communications.md`.

One row per One row per Rule 425 communication, keyed by its ACCESSION. The key is the accession and NOT the archive path because EDGAR indexes one communication under one path PER associated CIK, and a 425 associates BOTH parties: measured over four dissemination days spanning 2015-2024, 124 index rows carry only 88 distinct communications, and every one of the 36 duplicated accessions is duplicated because the filer and the subject are different companies. Keying on the path would store every genuine acquirer -> target edge TWICE - precisely the rows this dataset exists for..

Point-in-time availability

Every Obscura dataset carries available_date: the calendar day the publisher made the row available, day-of, with no session rounding. It is the one column a backtest filters on, and it means the same thing on every dataset in the catalog.

For edgar_merger_communications: filing_join: available_date is the EDGAR DISSEMINATION day, taken from the bronze object's own day partition, never from the header's FILED AS OF DATE. Rule 425 carries no embargo - a communication is public the day EDGAR disseminates it - but the header's legal filing date is NOT that day: accession 0001144204-19-039613 was accepted 2019-08-15 12:38:55, stamped FILED AS OF DATE 20190813, and appears in the daily index for 2019-08-15 and in neither the 08-13 nor the 08-14 index. Dating that row from the header would be a two-day look-ahead.

Refresh cadence

Obscura refreshes edgar_merger_communications every 6 hours - the most frequent scheduled job that re-collects or re-exports it. This is Obscura's own pipeline cadence, not the upstream publisher's release schedule; when a row became public is recorded per row in available_date.

Schema - 21 columns

The full public column list for edgar_merger_communications, with the meaning of every field. The same schema is served unauthenticated at https://api.obscura.trade/v1/catalog/edgar_merger_communications.

Access edgar_merger_communications

Two delivery paths, one identifier. Both require an Obscura account and an active subscription; the catalog entry and the schema above are public.

import obscura

client = obscura.Client("obs_live_…")

df = client.query(
    dataset="edgar_merger_communications",
    symbols=["NVDA", "AAPL"],
    start="2024-01-01",
)

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