The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) receives thousands of financial documents every day detailing the ins and outs of various publicly traded companies and publishes them on its website. Financial reporters who trawl through these SEC filings can often land a scoop, but it's a tedious and time-consuming task. Now, MarketBrief, a new start-up based in Mountain View, California, promises to publish over 1000 stories per day thanks to its software journalists.

It's easier than it sounds. SEC filings are published in a format called XBRL, or eXtensible Business Reporting Language, much like websites are published in HTML. MarketBrief's software generates articles by extracting key facts from the XBRL data and slotting them into pre-defined sentences.

The result is readable, if dull - "Kellogg W K Foundation Trust sold 100,000 shares of Kellogg Co stock, or $5,300,170 worth, as noted in an SEC Filing today" is a typical example - but MarketBrief will beat a human journalist to the punch every time, as the company claims it takes just three to 20 seconds for it to break a story.

This kind of automated reporting has also been attempted in other fields. Last year a company called Narrative Science, based in Evanston, Illinois, partnered with news organisations such as the Big Ten Network to publish automatically generated coverage of baseball and other sports. The company is working on its own system for covering financial stories and other data-heavy subjects.