Tracking Auction Rate Exposure

A couple of days ago, a librarian in California posted a question on pll-sis about tracking corporate exposure to losses and litigation from auction rate securties (ARS). I have a couple of suggestions for accomplishing this with West resources.

Public companies with proportionately large ARS exposure would have to disclose this risk in the Risk Factors section of their 10-K. I used the 10-K search function on Westlaw Business and narrowed my search to item 1A - Risk Factors. Then, I used the free text search to look for "auction rate." I found more than 200 companies that specified their auction rate securities portfolio as a potential risk.

To find lawsuits I used Westlaw. Trial filings from ARS-related suits are included in the FC-FILINGS database (financial crisis, trial filings). I searched "auction rate" /30 "auction rate" and found 51 filings from ongoing ARS lawsuits.

To track developments going forward, both of these searches can be saved as Alerts.