Form 485A24F Files Dataset

The Form 485A24F Files Dataset is a closed historical corpus of EDGAR submissions on form type 485A24F — Rule 485(a) post-effective amendments to open-end fund registration statements filed by mutual funds operating under the pre-NSMIA version of Rule 24f-2 (indefinite-share registration with annual fee payment). One record corresponds to a single EDGAR accession: a structured metadata.json plus one plain-text document-N.txt per document the registrant transmitted, packaged inside an accession-numbered folder. The filers are registered open-end management investment companies — typically series trusts amending an effective Form N-1A registration with material changes that require staff review under Rule 485(a). Coverage begins with the earliest sample date of 1995-05-01 and concentrates in the mid-to-late 1990s window before the SEC's 1997-1998 amendments to Rule 24f-2 retired the 24F suffix in favor of plain 485APOS / 485BPOS. The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers holding TXT and JSON files.

Dataset APIs

Dataset Files

What This Dataset Contains

The dataset packages every EDGAR-accepted Form 485A24F submission as an accession-level record. Form 485A24F is a post-effective amendment filed by an open-end management investment company (a mutual fund) under Rule 485(a) of the Securities Act of 1933, in which the registrant simultaneously elects the indefinite-share registration regime of Rule 24f-2 under the Investment Company Act of 1940. The unit of observation is the EDGAR accession number, not the registrant, the fund series, or the prospectus — one accession produces exactly one record folder, regardless of how many fund series or share classes the amendment covers.

Form 485A24F belongs to the family of post-effective amendments to N-1A (and historically N-3 and N-4) registration statements used by mutual funds, variable annuity separate accounts, and other open-end management investment companies. Two suffixes encode the regulatory posture of the filing:

• The "A" indicates Rule 485(a): the amendment contains material changes that require staff review and become effective only after a delay period (commonly 60 or 75 days, subject to acceleration), as opposed to Rule 485(b) amendments which become effective automatically.
• The "24F" indicates the indefinite-shares regime of Rule 24f-2: rather than registering a fixed dollar amount of shares and paying registration fees up front, the fund registers an indefinite number of shares and pays its registration fee retroactively on Form 24F-2 within 90 days after fiscal year end based on actual net sales.

Substantively, a 485A24F amendment carries a refreshed prospectus and statement of additional information ("SAI") for one or more series of an open-end fund, plus the exhibits required by Form N-1A (or its variable-product cousins N-3, N-4). Disclosures in the body include investment objectives, principal investment strategies, principal risks, the standardized fee table and expense example, past performance presentations, manager biographies, share class descriptions, purchase and redemption procedures, distribution arrangements, and tax treatment. Exhibits typically include corporate-governance documents (charter amendments, articles supplementary creating new classes), investment advisory and sub-advisory agreements, custodian and transfer-agency contracts, the Rule 12b-1 service and distribution plan, the auditor's consent, and various powers of attorney and certifications. The dataset retains only text documents and the JSON metadata file; image files (GIF, JPG) that may have been part of the original EDGAR submission are excluded. Containers are organized as monthly ZIP archives with file types TXT and JSON.

Content Structure of a Single Record

Physical shape of one record

Each record materializes as a single accession-numbered folder. The folder name is the 18-digit EDGAR accession number with the dashes stripped (for example 000089843096004941 for accession 0000898430-96-004941). Inside the folder are exactly two kinds of files:

1. metadata.json — a structured JSON object describing the filing.
2. document-{sequence}.txt — one plain-text document per document the filer transmitted, where {sequence} is the integer sequence number assigned by the filer in the EDGAR header.

There is one document-N.txt per row of the documentFormatFiles manifest in metadata.json, excluding the trailing manifest row that points at the consolidated EDGAR .txt submission file. The integer in the filename matches the sequence field exactly, allowing direct cross-reference between the manifest and the on-disk files. Each ZIP expands into a single year-month directory (for example 1996-10/) whose children are the accession-numbered record folders for every 485A24F accepted by EDGAR during that month.

Structure of metadata.json

The metadata file is a flat JSON object with the following intentional fields:

• formType — always "485A24F" for this dataset.
• accessionNo — the EDGAR accession number in dashed form (e.g. "0000898430-96-004941").
• filedAt — ISO 8601 timestamp with timezone reflecting EDGAR's acceptance time.
• description — human-readable form description, typically "Form 485A24F - Post Effective Amendments".
• linkToFilingDetails — URL to the EDGAR archive directory for the filing.
• linkToTxt — URL to the complete submission .txt file as served by EDGAR.
• linkToHtml — URL to the EDGAR index HTML page for the filing.
• linkToXbrl — empty for this form type.
• id — an opaque hash uniquely identifying the record.
• documentFormatFiles — array of document descriptors, one per transmitted document plus a trailing entry for the consolidated submission text file.
• dataFiles — array of structured data files; empty for this dataset.
• entities — array of one or more registrant/filer entity objects.
• seriesAndClassesContractsInformation — array of fund series and class identifiers; populated for filings on or after 2006 and otherwise empty.

documentFormatFiles[]

Each element is a manifest row for one document in the original SGML submission:

• sequence — string integer that maps directly to the on-disk filename document-{sequence}.txt. The trailing manifest entry that points at the consolidated submission .txt carries a single space " " for both sequence and type and exists only as a pointer to that EDGAR-hosted file rather than as a separate document on disk.
• type — EDGAR document-type code: "485A24F" for the amendment body itself, and "EX-2.C", "EX-5.A", "EX-5.B", "EX-11", "EX-15", etc. for exhibits.
• description — free-text label provided by the filer (e.g. "POST EFFECTIVE AMENDMENT", "ARTICLES SUPPLEMENTARY", "FORM OF INVESTMENT ADVISORY AGREEMENT", "CONSENT OF INDEPENDENT AUDITORS", "SERVICE AND DISTRIBUTION PLAN").
• size — string byte-count of the original document on EDGAR.
• documentUrl — URL to the EDGAR-hosted copy of the document or filing folder.

entities[]

Each registrant/filer descriptor carries:

• companyName — registrant name as it appears on EDGAR, with the role suffix (e.g. "SANTA BARBARA GROUP OF MUTUAL FUNDS INC (Filer)").
• cik — EDGAR Central Index Key.
• type — usually mirrors the form code ("485A24F").
• act — Securities Act / Investment Company Act number under which the entity is identified (e.g. "40" for the 1940 Act).
• fileNo — SEC file number (e.g. "811-07414" for an investment company file).
• filmNo — EDGAR film number assigned at acceptance.
• stateOfIncorporation — two-letter state code (e.g. "MD", "DE", "MA").

For umbrella trusts that file on behalf of multiple registrants, the entities array can contain several objects.

seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[]

When populated, this array carries the SEC's series-and-class identifiers introduced for mutual funds in 2006 (series IDs of the form S000NNNNNN and class/contract IDs of the form C000NNNNNN), letting a single 485A24F unambiguously identify which fund series and share classes its prospectus and SAI cover. For filings predating the series/class system the array is empty.

Structure of document-N.txt files

Each document-N.txt is the body of one EDGAR document extracted from the outer SGML envelope of the original consolidated .txt submission. The dataset preserves the document body but strips the outer <DOCUMENT>...</DOCUMENT> SGML wrapper and the EDGAR submission header. SGML-era documents are ASCII text broken into pages by EDGAR's traditional <PAGE> page-break marker, with tabular content rendered using EDGAR's SGML table dialect: <TABLE> and </TABLE> to delimit tables, <CAPTION> to mark caption rows, and <S> / <C> markers (sometimes with column-width hints) to delimit the stub column and successive numeric or text columns. There is no HTML, CSS, or JavaScript in those documents; they are raw fixed-width ASCII intended to render in a monospace viewer. HTML-era documents store HTML markup verbatim inside the same document-N.txt containers.

document-1.txt — the amendment body

The first document (sequence 1, type 485A24F) is the amendment proper. It opens with the canonical Form N-1A facing-page block identifying:

• the registration statement number under the Securities Act of 1933,
• the registrant name and address,
• the boxes ticked for "Post-Effective Amendment No. N" under both the Securities Act of 1933 and the Investment Company Act of 1940,
• the proposed effective date language (Rule 485(a)(1) versus Rule 485(a)(2)),
• the Rule 24f-2 declaration, and
• the contact and signature blocks.

After the facing page comes the prospectus (Part A of N-1A): the risk/return summary (post-1998), investment objectives and principal strategies, principal risks, fee table and expense example, performance bar chart and average annual total return table, manager and adviser identification, share-class purchase/redemption mechanics, distribution and Rule 12b-1 disclosures, dividend and tax treatment, and financial highlights. Part B (the SAI) follows: investment policies and restrictions, fundamental versus non-fundamental policies, trustee/director and officer disclosure, control and ownership tables, brokerage allocation, capital structure, custodian and auditor identification, and the financial statements with notes. Part C (Other Information) closes the document: indemnification, exhibit list, undertakings, persons controlled by or under common control with the registrant, and the signature pages.

In SGML-era filings these parts are typically concatenated into a single document file separated by <PAGE> markers; in later HTML-era filings they may be split across multiple sequence-numbered documents.

document-2.txt and beyond — exhibits

Subsequent document-N.txt files are the exhibits enumerated in Item 23 of Form N-1A (renumbered to Item 28 in later versions). Each carries an EDGAR exhibit-type code drawn from a vocabulary that is era-dependent because the lettering scheme of N-1A has shifted. Common codes include:

• EX-1 / EX-2.x — articles of incorporation, declaration of trust, articles supplementary creating new classes or series.
• EX-2 / EX-3 — bylaws.
• EX-4 — instruments defining rights of security holders.
• EX-5.A / EX-5.B — investment advisory agreements and sub-advisory agreements.
• EX-6 — underwriting/distribution agreements.
• EX-7 — bonus, profit-sharing, pension, or similar plans.
• EX-8 — custodian agreements.
• EX-9 — legal opinion and consent.
• EX-10 — opinion regarding tax matters.
• EX-11 — consents of independent registered public accounting firms.
• EX-13 — initial capital agreements.
• EX-15 — Rule 12b-1 service and distribution plans.
• EX-16 — schedules of computation of performance data.
• EX-17 — powers of attorney.

Exhibit bodies range from short legal letters (an auditor consent is often a single page) to multi-page contracts with definitions, schedules, and signature blocks. Tables embedded in exhibits — newly classified shares in articles supplementary, fee schedules in advisory agreements, performance computation tables — also use the <TABLE>/<CAPTION>/<S>/<C> SGML dialect rather than HTML.

Included content

For each accession the record retains the metadata header and every text document of the original EDGAR submission: the post-effective amendment itself (which carries the prospectus, the SAI, and Part C), all exhibits transmitted by the filer, and any cover correspondence that was filed as a separate document. The document bodies preserve the SGML page and table markers as filed, so fee tables, performance tables, and capitalization tables remain machine-recoverable even though they are encoded in EDGAR's ASCII table dialect rather than HTML.

Excluded or separate content

Image files originally transmitted in the EDGAR submission (logo GIFs, signature images, performance chart bitmaps) are excluded from the record. The outer SGML <DOCUMENT> wrappers and the EDGAR submission header that wrap each document inside the original consolidated .txt file are not preserved as separate artifacts; only the inner document bodies remain. There is no XBRL or other structured data payload for this form type — linkToXbrl is empty and dataFiles is [] — because the SEC's Risk/Return Summary XBRL submissions are filed under separate form types and accessions, not bundled into the 485A24F.

Subsequent or related filings (the original N-1A initial registration, prior 485B amendments, the annual Form 24F-2 fee filing that pairs with the indefinite-share registration, N-CSR shareholder reports, N-PX proxy votes) live as separate accessions in their own datasets and are not bundled into a 485A24F record. Image-bearing exhibits whose informational content lived in a bitmap (rare, but possible for older performance charts) are therefore not recoverable from the textual dataset.

How required content and structure have evolved

Form 485A24F's substantive content is governed primarily by Form N-1A, which has been substantially revised several times during the 1995-present coverage window:

• 1998 prospectus disclosure reform. The SEC's "plain English" amendments (Rule 421(d), adopted March 1998) and the contemporaneous overhaul of Form N-1A required the prospectus to be reorganized around a standardized risk/return summary at the front, including the fee table, performance bar chart, average annual total return table, principal investment strategies, principal risks, and portfolio turnover. Pre-1998 prospectuses follow the older narrative organization; later filings follow the standardized risk/return summary structure.
• 2001 Rule 24f-2 simplification. The SEC modernized Rule 24f-2 in 2001, replacing the old Rule 24e-2 and tightening the timing and arithmetic of the annual indefinite-shares fee filing on Form 24F-2. The 485A24F amendment remained the registration vehicle, but its relationship to the annual fee filing became cleaner and more uniform.
• 2006 series and class identifier regime. Beginning in 2006 the SEC required mutual funds to identify each series and share class with EDGAR-issued identifiers (S000… and C000…). Filings on or after that date populate seriesAndClassesContractsInformation; earlier filings do not.
• 2009 summary prospectus rule. Rule 498 introduced the optional summary prospectus, which led many funds to restructure the front of the statutory prospectus around the same item-by-item risk/return summary that the summary prospectus uses, and to include summary-prospectus content as part of the 485A24F.
• Renumbering of N-1A items. The items governing investment objectives, fee tables, performance, management, purchase/redemption, taxes, and financial highlights have been renumbered (most notably in the 1998 reorganization), so item references inside the prospectus and SAI of older versus newer filings refer to different item numbers even when the substantive disclosures map onto each other.

Exhibit numbering in Item 23 / Item 28 of N-1A has also shifted across these revisions, so the set of EX- type codes that appear in documentFormatFiles is era-dependent.

How filing format has evolved

485A24F filings have been transmitted to EDGAR continuously from 1995 onward, but the filing technology has changed materially:

• 1995 — early 2000s: SGML/ASCII era. Submissions were filed as monolithic .txt files using EDGAR's SGML envelope. Document bodies are ASCII with <PAGE> page breaks and <TABLE>/<S>/<C> table markers. Tabular content (fee tables, performance tables, capitalization tables) is rendered with fixed-width columns inside SGML <TABLE> blocks. The on-disk document-N.txt files for filings of this vintage carry that ASCII/SGML body verbatim.
• Early 2000s onward: HTML adoption. EDGAR began accepting HTML for fund filings, and most filers migrated to HTML prospectuses and exhibits. The HTML still sits inside EDGAR's outer SGML <DOCUMENT> wrapper, but the body becomes HTML markup with embedded tables, anchors, and stylistic tags. In the dataset, HTML-era documents are stored as document-N.txt files preserving the HTML source as text.

Interpretation and extraction notes

Several nuances matter when extracting or analyzing records:

• The sequence field is the only reliable bridge between the manifest and the on-disk filenames. The description and type labels are filer-supplied and vary in capitalization, abbreviation, and wording across filers and across time.
• The trailing entry in documentFormatFiles with a blank sequence and a type of " " is a pointer to EDGAR's consolidated complete-submission .txt and does not correspond to an on-disk file in the record folder; consumers iterating the manifest must skip it.
• A 485A24F may be filed by an umbrella registrant on behalf of dozens of fund series and many share classes. The entities array reflects only the registrant(s); the actual coverage is articulated inside the prospectus body and (post-2006) inside seriesAndClassesContractsInformation.
• "Post-Effective Amendment No. N" numbering is registrant-specific and increments with every 485A or 485B amendment to that file number. The amendment number visible on the facing page of document-1.txt is the authoritative count for the registration statement, not the EDGAR accession sequence.
• Exhibits are very frequently incorporated by reference from prior post-effective amendments rather than refiled in full. In such cases Part C lists the exhibit and identifies the prior accession, but no document-N.txt for that exhibit appears in the record. The absence of a given exhibit on disk is therefore expected and not a data defect.
• Inline tables encoded with <TABLE>, <CAPTION>, <S>, and <C> SGML markers are not HTML — naive HTML parsers will fail on them. Extracting fee tables and performance tables from SGML-era filings requires either monospace column reconstruction or a parser that understands EDGAR's table dialect.
• Pre-1998 filings predate the plain-English prospectus reform; the prospectus organization, terminology, and item numbering in those documents differ markedly from later filings even when the substantive disclosures are equivalent.
• Signature blocks appear at the end of document-1.txt (within Part C) and frequently again inside individual exhibits (advisory agreements, articles supplementary, powers of attorney). They are rendered as ASCII or HTML text rather than as image scans, so signatory names and dates are extractable from the document text.

Who Files or Publishes This Dataset, and When

The filer is a registered open-end management investment company (a mutual fund) that registers its shares on Form N-1A and has elected the Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share registration regime under the Investment Company Act of 1940. Most filers are series trusts (Massachusetts business trusts, Delaware statutory trusts, or Maryland corporations) that hold multiple portfolios. The legal registrant is the trust or corporation; the disclosure subject is usually one or more series within it, and a single filing may update several series at once.

Excluded from this dataset:

• Closed-end funds (post-effective amendments use Form N-2 mechanics).
• Unit investment trusts and insurance separate accounts on Forms N-3, N-4, N-6, or S-6, which have their own 485-series tags.
• Business development companies, operating-company issuers, and foreign private issuers, which amend registration statements through the S-series or F-series under Rule 462, not Rule 485.
• Initial N-1A registration statements (only post-effective amendments appear here).

What triggers the filing

Form 485A24F is event-driven, not periodic. It is filed when a fund amends an effective registration statement with material changes that do not qualify for the immediate-effectiveness path of Rule 485(b). Typical triggers:

• Adding a new series or share class to an existing trust.
• Material changes to investment objectives, principal strategies, or principal risks.
• Fund reorganizations, mergers, or restructurings that require updated disclosure.
• Any other content the registrant or staff determines falls outside the narrow categories permitted under Rule 485(b).

Open-end funds are required to keep their prospectus and SAI current within 16 months of the prior effective date, so most funds file at least one post-effective amendment per year. A 485A24F arises whenever that update (or an interim update) requires Rule 485(a) treatment.

Effective-date mechanics

A Rule 485(a) amendment becomes effective 60 days after filing for material changes, or 75 days after filing for amendments adding a new series, unless the SEC accelerates or designates a different date. Staff may issue comments during the review window; the registrant may respond by amendment or request acceleration. Because of the delay, registrants plan 485A24F filings well ahead of any sales date that depends on the new disclosure.

Regulatory basis

Two rules combine in this form:

• Rule 485(a) under the Securities Act of 1933 governs delayed-effectiveness post-effective amendments by open-end funds, UITs, and separate accounts when the amendment contains material changes requiring staff review.
• Rule 24f-2 under the Investment Company Act of 1940 allows open-end funds to register an indefinite number of shares and pay registration fees annually based on net sales, rather than registering a fixed dollar amount up front. The "24F" suffix in the form type identifies that the registrant operates under this election.

Form 485A24F therefore sits at the junction of a 1933 Act registration amendment and a 1940 Act indefinite-share election.

Edge cases

• A filing later amended keeps its own accession number; the dataset records each accession separately rather than collapsing the amendment chain.
• Insurance separate accounts and UITs may use forms whose tags look similar to the 485 series but are governed by different registration mechanics and are not in this dataset.
• The legal filer is always the trust or corporation, even when the substantive update concerns only one series within it.

How This Dataset Differs From Similar Datasets or Filings

Form 485A24F sits inside a tightly clustered family of open-end fund registration filings. Confusion almost always comes from neighboring members of the Form 485 series and from the standalone Rule 24f-2 fee filings. The form is a historical artifact: the "24F" suffix flagged a Rule 485(a) post-effective amendment filed by a fund using the pre-NSMIA version of Rule 24f-2, which let open-end funds register an indefinite number of shares and pay registration fees annually. After NSMIA (1996) and the SEC's 1997-1998 amendments to Rule 24f-2, fee payment was moved entirely to the standalone Form 24F-2, and the 485A24F / 485B24F suffixes were retired in favor of plain 485APOS / 485BPOS. The dataset's filings are concentrated between 1995 and the late-1990s transition, reflecting that narrow window.

Closest related filings

The most useful comparison points are the other Form 485 amendment types (485APOS, 485BPOS, 485B24F), the standalone Rule 24f-2 fee filings (24F-2), the underlying N-1A registration statement, and Rule 497 prospectus filings.

Key differences

Form 485APOS — The direct modern successor. Same Rule 485(a) reviewed-amendment path, same 60-day staff review, same substantive content (amended prospectus, SAI, fee tables, exhibits). The only real difference is the fee mechanism: 485A24F filers paid annual fees under the old Rule 24f-2; 485APOS filers register indefinitely by default and remit fees through Form 24F-2 within 90 days of fiscal year end. For any analysis crossing 1998, 485APOS is the continuity dataset; 485A24F is the legacy tail.

Form 485BPOS — Same Form 485 family, but routed under Rule 485(b): auto-effective without staff review, and limited to non-material updates (annual refreshes, fee-table updates, permitted disclosure tweaks). Whereas 485A24F signals material changes requiring examination, 485BPOS captures the routine annual cycle. Use 485BPOS as the routine-update complement to 485A24F's material-amendment signal in the mid-1990s.

Form 485B24F — The historical sibling of 485A24F: identical pre-NSMIA Rule 24f-2 mechanism, but on the auto-effective Rule 485(b) path instead of the reviewed 485(a) path. The 485A24F vs. 485B24F split mirrors the modern 485APOS vs. 485BPOS split. To reconstruct a single fund's full 1995-1998 amendment history, both datasets are typically needed.

Form 24F-2 (and Form 24F-2NT) — Not a registration-content filing. 24F-2 is the standalone fee-payment notice reporting net share sales for the fiscal year and remitting the registration fee owed. 485A24F is the disclosure amendment of a fund operating under the 24f-2 regime; 24F-2 is the fee accounting that completes the regime. After 1997, 24F-2 became the universal fee-payment vehicle for all open-end funds regardless of 485 variant. Use 24F-2 for fee/sales data; use 485A24F for prospectus and SAI content.

Form N-1A — The parent registration statement, used by open-end management investment companies to register shares (Parts A, B, C). Every 485-series filing — including 485A24F — is an amendment to an already-effective N-1A. N-1A datasets carry the full structural template and initial registrations; 485A24F carries only the amendment-stage revisions and exhibits actually changed or refiled. Reconstructing a fund's complete disclosure history requires the N-1A baseline plus the chain of 485 amendments.

Form 497 — Definitive prospectuses, prospectus supplements (stickers), and summary prospectuses filed under Rule 497. Document type overlaps (both can carry prospectus and SAI text), but the filing role differs: 485A24F amends the registration statement itself and triggers SEC review; 497 deposits the definitive version of the prospectus after effectiveness, or sticker-updates discrete items without amending the registration. A 1996 fund filing a 485A24F would typically follow it with a 497 once the amendment took effect. 497 is high-volume and ongoing; 485A24F is narrow, amendment-specific, and historically bounded.

Boundary summary

Form 485A24F occupies one narrow intersection: a Rule 485(a) reviewed post-effective amendment, filed by an open-end fund operating under the pre-1998 version of Rule 24f-2 (indefinite registration with annual fee payment). It is not interchangeable with 485APOS (modern fee regime), 485BPOS or 485B24F (auto-effective path), 24F-2 (fee accounting, not disclosure), N-1A (initial registration), or 497 (post-effectiveness prospectus deposits). Its closest analog today is 485APOS, but the two should not be merged without accounting for the 1997-1998 shift in the underlying fee-payment regime. For continuous historical analysis, treat 485A24F as the legacy left tail of 485APOS, pair it with 485B24F for routine amendments, and join to 24F-2 for the fee side.

Who Uses This Dataset

The Form 485A24F Files Dataset is a research and reference resource bounded by the pre-NSMIA Rule 24f-2 regime, not a live monitoring feed. Its audience is research-oriented and concentrated in a handful of professions.

Investment company lawyers and registration counsel

Fund counsel use the corpus to research pre-NSMIA Rule 24f-2 practice: chain-of-title questions for series originated in the 1990s, lineage of current Rule 485(a) post-effective amendment drafting, and historical exhibits for litigation involving long-tenured funds. Most-used elements: cover-page legends, registration-fee computation tables, opinions of counsel, auditor consents, and prospectus body language on investment policies.

Mutual fund compliance officers and fund administrators

Compliance and administration teams retrieve as-filed 485A24F text to satisfy recordkeeping audits, succession-of-counsel reviews, and questions about how a prospectus or SAI read at a specific 1990s date. They rely on the metadata file (CIK, accession, filing date), the prospectus and SAI text, and the signature and certification pages, especially when paper-era internal archives are incomplete.

Financial historians and academics

Researchers studying the 1990s mutual fund expansion use these filings as primary sources on how funds described emerging strategies (international equity, sector funds, derivatives, money-market structures) before later disclosure conventions hardened. Investment-objective sections, fee tables, and risk language support peer-reviewed work on disclosure evolution and fee-structure history.

Regulatory and policy researchers

Analysts studying the 1996 NSMIA reforms and the rewrite of Rule 24f-2 use the dataset as a before-snapshot of the indefinite-share registration regime. Fee-computation tables, the Rule 24f-2 facing-page language, and filing dates relative to the statutory transition feed comment-letter precedent work, retrospective regulatory-impact studies, and law review articles.

Quantitative researchers building historical prospectus corpora

Researchers assembling longitudinal fund-disclosure panels use this corpus to fill the 1995 through late-1990s segment. They need raw filing text, issuer CIK, filing date, and clean separation between prospectus, SAI, and exhibits to integrate 485A24F cleanly alongside other legacy fund-registration forms. Output: panels feeding studies of fee dispersion, strategy clustering, and readability over time.

NLP and LLM/RAG developers

Machine-learning teams use the dataset as a domain- and era-specific training or retrieval supplement. The mid-1990s prospectus and SAI text adds language patterns underrepresented in modern training data, and the structured fee-table content supports extraction benchmarks. For retrieval-augmented systems, the EDGAR text plus accession metadata extends indices into the pre-2000 fund record so generated answers can be grounded in actual filings rather than approximated.

Specific Use Cases

The corpus, bounded to roughly 1995 through the late-1990s, supports a narrow set of historical, regulatory, and corpus-construction workflows tied to the pre-NSMIA Rule 24f-2 regime.

• Reconstructing a fund's mid-1990s amendment history. Pair 485A24F (reviewed) with 485B24F (auto-effective) accessions for the same CIK and fileNo to rebuild a single registrant's full chain of post-effective amendments from 1995 through the 1997-1998 transition. The facing-page "Post-Effective Amendment No. N" line in document-1.txt, combined with filedAt and the SEC fileNo from entities[], gives an ordered amendment ledger that fund counsel and compliance archivists use to answer chain-of-title and recordkeeping-audit questions.

• Before-snapshot for NSMIA and Rule 24f-2 reform research. Regulatory historians use the dataset as the pre-reform reference set when studying the 1996 NSMIA changes and the 1997-1998 rewrite of Rule 24f-2. The Rule 24f-2 declaration on the facing page of document-1.txt, the registration-fee computation tables, and the filedAt distribution relative to the statutory effective date feed retrospective regulatory-impact analyses and law review articles comparing the indefinite-share regime before and after the move to standalone Form 24F-2 fee filings.

• Plain-English prospectus diff studies. Because the corpus straddles the SEC's 1998 plain-English and risk/return-summary reform, researchers extract the prospectus body from document-1.txt (Part A of N-1A), segment by <PAGE> markers, and compare pre-1998 narrative organization against later standardized risk/return summaries. Outputs include readability-trajectory panels, terminology-shift tables for principal risks, and disclosure-evolution case studies on emerging 1990s strategies (international equity, derivatives, sector and money-market funds).

• Two-axis taxonomy benchmarks for filing classifiers. ML teams building 485-series classifiers use the dataset as the labeled "reviewed + pre-NSMIA fee regime" cell of the two-axis taxonomy (485(a) vs. 485(b) on one axis, pre- vs. post-NSMIA fee mechanism on the other). The combination of formType, the Rule 485(a)(1) / 485(a)(2) effective-date language in the amendment body, and the Rule 24f-2 declaration provides ground-truth labels for distinguishing 485A24F from 485APOS, 485BPOS, and 485B24F in mixed corpora.

• SGML table extraction benchmarks. Because every record predates EDGAR HTML adoption, every fee table, expense example, and performance/capitalization table in document-1.txt and exhibits is encoded with <TABLE>, <CAPTION>, <S>, and <C> SGML markers. NLP teams use the corpus as a fixed evaluation set for SGML-table parsers, fixed-width column reconstruction, and extraction pipelines that must operate on pre-HTML EDGAR text.

• Exhibit-level contract corpora for the 1990s fund industry. Subsequent document-N.txt files separated by exhibit code (EX-5.A advisory agreements, EX-5.B sub-advisory agreements, EX-15 Rule 12b-1 service and distribution plans, EX-11 auditor consents, EX-2.C articles supplementary) yield a small but clean corpus of mid-1990s fund contracts. Counsel pull these to source historical exhibits for litigation involving long-tenured funds; quantitative researchers use them to study advisory-fee schedules and 12b-1 plan structures from before later disclosure conventions hardened.

• RAG grounding for pre-2000 fund questions. LLM and RAG developers index the prospectus, SAI, and exhibit text alongside accessionNo, filedAt, and linkToFilingDetails so that questions about how a specific fund described its strategy, fees, or share-class structure in the mid-1990s resolve to a citable EDGAR accession rather than to model approximation, extending retrieval coverage into a window that is sparse in modern training data.

Dataset Access

The dataset is available through three access methods: a JSON metadata index, a full archive download, and per-container downloads. The full archive and per-container downloads require an API key, which can be passed either as a token query string parameter or via an Authorization header.

Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-485a24f-files.json

This endpoint returns metadata describing the dataset and the list of available container files. The response includes the dataset name, description, last updated timestamp, earliest sample date (1995-05-01), total records and total size, form types covered (485A24F), container format (ZIP), file types contained in each container (TXT, JSON), and a containers array. Each container entry includes a key, downloadUrl, size, records, and updatedAt timestamp, which can be polled to detect which containers were modified in the most recent refresh and to selectively re-download only the changed containers. This endpoint does not require an API key.

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          {
        

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            "datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-6a54-ac78-e7d46d7140e3",
        

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            "datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-485a24f-files.zip",
        

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            "name": "Form 485A24F Files Dataset",
        

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            "updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:45:40.783Z",
        

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            "earliestSampleDate": "1995-05-01",
        

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            "totalRecords": 167,
        

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            "totalSize": 2663110,
        

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            "formTypes": ["485A24F"],
        

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            "containerFormat": "ZIP",
        

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            "fileTypes": ["TXT", "JSON"],
        

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            "containers": [
        

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              {
        

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                "downloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-485a24f-files/1995/1995-05.zip",
        

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                "key": "1995/1995-05.zip",
        

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                "size": 142336,
        

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                "records": 12,
        

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                "updatedAt": "2026-04-16T08:45:40.783Z"
        

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              }
        

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            ]
        

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          }
        

Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-485a24f-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY

Downloads the complete dataset as a single ZIP archive containing every monthly container from May 1995 to the present. This endpoint requires an API key, supplied either through the token query parameter or an Authorization: YOUR_API_KEY header.

Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-485a24f-files/1995/1995-05.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY

Downloads one individual monthly container instead of the full archive. Use the downloadUrl values from the index containers array to retrieve specific months. This endpoint requires an API key passed via the token query parameter or an Authorization header.

Frequently Asked Questions

What form does this dataset cover?

The dataset covers EDGAR submissions of form type 485A24F: a Rule 485(a) post-effective amendment to a Form N-1A registration statement, filed by an open-end management investment company that has elected the indefinite-share registration regime under Rule 24f-2 of the Investment Company Act of 1940.

What does one record in this dataset represent?

One record corresponds to a single EDGAR accession, identified by its 18-digit accession number. Each accession produces one folder containing a metadata.json describing the filing plus one document-N.txt per document the registrant transmitted (the amendment body and any exhibits), regardless of how many fund series or share classes the amendment covers.

Who is required to file Form 485A24F?

Registered open-end management investment companies — typically Massachusetts business trusts, Delaware statutory trusts, or Maryland corporations operating as series trusts — that registered shares on Form N-1A under the pre-NSMIA Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share regime. Closed-end funds, UITs, insurance separate accounts on N-3/N-4/N-6/S-6, business development companies, and operating-company issuers are excluded.

What triggers a 485A24F filing?

A 485A24F is event-driven. It is filed when a fund makes material changes to its effective registration statement that do not qualify for Rule 485(b)'s immediate-effectiveness path — for example adding a new series or share class, changing investment objectives or principal risks, or implementing fund reorganizations. A Rule 485(a) amendment becomes effective 60 days after filing for material changes, or 75 days for amendments adding a new series, unless the SEC accelerates.

How does this dataset differ from the 485APOS dataset?

485APOS is the modern direct successor to 485A24F. Both use the same Rule 485(a) reviewed-amendment path with the same 60-day staff review and the same substantive content. The difference is the fee mechanism: 485A24F filers paid annual fees under the pre-NSMIA Rule 24f-2; 485APOS filers register indefinitely by default and remit fees through standalone Form 24F-2. After the 1997-1998 amendments to Rule 24f-2, the 24F suffix was retired and material-change amendments now appear as 485APOS.

What time period does the dataset cover?

The earliest sample date is 1995-05-01. The corpus is concentrated in the mid-1990s through the 1997-1998 transition window, when the SEC's amendments to Rule 24f-2 retired the 485A24F and 485B24F suffixes in favor of plain 485APOS and 485BPOS.

What file format is the dataset distributed in?

The dataset is distributed as monthly ZIP containers, one per filing month. Each ZIP expands into a year-month directory (for example 1996-10/) holding accession-numbered record folders, and each folder contains TXT and JSON files: a metadata.json plus one document-N.txt per transmitted document. Image files from the original EDGAR submissions and any XBRL payloads are not included.