The Form S-6EL24 Files Dataset is a closed, complete collection of Securities Act of 1933 registration statements filed on EDGAR submission types S-6EL24 and S-6EL24/A between January 1994 and October 1997, when the submission type was retired. Each record corresponds to one EDGAR accession — the filing of a unit investment trust (UIT) registered as an investment company on Form N-8B-2 that elected, under Rule 24f-2 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, to register an indefinite number of securities. For every accession the dataset packages a structured metadata.json manifest together with the plain-text content of every non-image document in the original submission, so that the prospectus, statement of condition, fee tables, depositor and trustee identification, and exhibit complement of each filing are available verbatim alongside form-level identifiers and a complete document inventory. Filers are UITs and their depositors — retail brokerage affiliates and dedicated UIT sponsors that launched defined-asset trust series and insurance-company separate accounts during the mid-1990s. The dataset is distributed as ZIP containers holding only TXT and JSON files.
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Each record in the Form S-6EL24 Files Dataset corresponds to one EDGAR submission filed under submission type S-6EL24 or S-6EL24/A, identified by its SEC accession number. Form S-6EL24 is a Securities Act of 1933 registration statement used by UITs that are also registered as investment companies on Form N-8B-2. The form is a variant of Form S-6: the EL24 suffix signals that the registrant elected, under Rule 24f-2 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, to register an indefinite number of securities and pay registration fees on the basis of net sales after the fact. The /A variant denotes a pre-effective amendment to a previously filed S-6EL24, used to revise the prospectus or update exhibits before the registration statement is declared effective.
Substantively, an S-6EL24 filing is the offering document for a UIT — most commonly an insurance-company separate account funding variable life insurance or variable annuity contracts, or a fixed-portfolio defined-asset trust series. The submission type was active between January 1994 and October 1997, after which the EL24 designation was retired and successor electronic-filing types absorbed its function. The dataset spans the entire active life of the form on EDGAR and is closed: no new S-6EL24 or S-6EL24/A filings will be added.
Inside the dataset, each record materializes as one folder named after the accession number with dashes stripped (for example, accession 0000928389-97-000216 becomes folder 000092838997000216). Inside the folder are two kinds of files: a single metadata.json describing the filing, and one or more sequentially numbered document-N.txt files holding the plain-text content of every textual component of the original EDGAR submission. Image attachments from the original submission are excluded; everything else is preserved verbatim as ASCII text. The dataset stores files of types TXT and JSON only.
Each record has two structural layers. The first is the dataset-packaging layer: the metadata.json manifest plus the document files. The second is the content of the registration statement itself, which unfolds across the primary prospectus document and a sequence of supporting exhibits.
metadata.json manifestmetadata.json is the canonical structured description of one filing. It carries the form-level identifiers and bibliographic data that EDGAR records for the submission, plus an inventory of every document attached to it. Fields present in a record include:
formType — S-6EL24 for an initial registration or S-6EL24/A for a pre-effective amendment.accessionNo — the SEC accession number in dashed canonical form (e.g., 0000928389-97-000216).filedAt — ISO-8601 timestamp with timezone marking when EDGAR accepted the submission (e.g., 1997-10-09T00:00:00-04:00).description — short human-readable label such as Form S-6EL24 - Registration statements of unit investment trusts.linkToFilingDetails, linkToTxt, linkToHtml — EDGAR archive URLs pointing respectively to the filing's archive directory, its complete-submission .txt file, and its -index.htm page.linkToXbrl — empty string; S-6EL24 filings predate the XBRL regime for investment-company filings.id — an opaque 32-character hex identifier for the record.documentFormatFiles[] — an ordered array of submitted documents. Each entry has a sequence number aligned with the document-N.txt filename, an EDGAR type code (e.g., S-6EL24, S-6EL24/A, EX-99.A1, EX-99.A(5)(A), EX-4.B, EX-4.2, EX-5, EX-23.1, EX-27), a free-form description (e.g., AMENDED PROSPECTUS, REFERENCE TRUST AGREEMENT, RESOLUTIONS, POWERS OF ATTORNEY), a string-encoded size byte count, and a documentUrl pointing back to the original on EDGAR. A trailing entry with a blank sequence value refers to the consolidated complete-submission text file rather than to a per-document file and therefore has no corresponding document-N.txt in the record.entities[] — the list of parties on the filing, almost always a single Filer. Each entity carries companyName with the EDGAR role appended in parentheses (e.g., COVA VARIABLE LIFE ACCOUNT FIVE (Filer)), cik, fileNo (the Securities Act file number, frequently in the 333- series), filmNo, an entity-level type mirroring the top-level form type, act set to 33 for the Securities Act of 1933, and where available sic (sometimes 0000 for separate accounts), stateOfIncorporation, and fiscalYearEnd as MMDD.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[] and dataFiles[] — present but empty for this dataset, because the series-and-class infrastructure and structured data-file regime postdate the active period of S-6EL24.document-N.txt filesDocument files are plain ASCII text extracted from the original 1994–1997 EDGAR submission, one per textual component. They are not wrapped in an SGML <DOCUMENT>…</DOCUMENT> envelope at the per-file level — that wrapper exists only in the consolidated complete-submission .txt on EDGAR, while in the dataset each component is delivered as bare text. The most common SGML-era artifact that survives the split is the inline <PAGE> page-break marker, which appears throughout long prospectuses and exhibits. Typography is pre-HTML: fixed-width columns, ruled lines drawn with hyphens and equals signs, manually centered headings, and tabular data laid out with whitespace.
document-1.txt — registration statement cover and prospectusThe first document is the heart of the filing. It opens with the standard EDGAR cover block identifying the form as Form S-6 for registration under the Securities Act of 1933 of securities of unit investment trusts registered on Form N-8B-2. Immediately below the cover, the form presents a series of labeled items, conventionally A through H, that supply the registrant identification and offering parameters required by the form's instructions:
Following these items, the cover carries the Section 8(a) "delaying amendment" paragraph that postpones effectiveness until the registrant or the Commission acts, and a cross-reference table mapping the captions of Form N-8B-2 to the corresponding locations in the prospectus. This cross-reference is a defining feature of S-6 filings: because the substantive disclosure framework lives in Form N-8B-2 (the registration statement under the Investment Company Act), the S-6 cover ties each N-8B-2 caption to the page or section of the prospectus where that information appears.
The prospectus body follows the cross-reference table and is the longest section of the record. Its substantive disclosures typically cover:
For variable-insurance separate accounts, the prospectus additionally discusses the contracts funded by the account, the available investment options, charges deducted from premiums or account value, and the rights of contract owners.
Signatures appear at the end of document-1.txt, executed by the depositor on behalf of the trust and, where required, by the principal executive and financial officers and a majority of the directors of the depositor; powers of attorney filed as exhibits typically authorize one or more officers to sign amendments on behalf of the directors.
document-2.txt through document-N.txt — exhibitsSubsequent documents are the exhibits required by the form's instructions or filed voluntarily, each aligned with the type and description recorded at the matching sequence position in documentFormatFiles[]. The exhibit population is heterogeneous and reflects the dual character of these trusts as both Securities Act registrants and Investment Company Act entities. Typical exhibit categories include:
EX-99.A1 or EX-99.A(1));EX-99.A(5)(A), EX-99.A(5)(B), EX-4.B, or EX-4.2);EX-99.A(6)(C));EX-99.A10 or EX-99.A(10));EX-99.A11 or EX-99.A(11));EX-5, EX-99.C(6));EX-23.1);EX-27), the structured tagging convention used in EDGAR before XBRL.The body of each exhibit is the literal text of the underlying document — a contract, a letter opinion on counsel's letterhead, a numbered list of resolutions, a signed power of attorney — preserving the original layout to the extent the EDGAR ASCII format permitted. Each exhibit commonly opens with a <PAGE> marker followed by an "Exhibit X" caption, a date, an addressee (for legal opinions or consent letters), and the substantive text.
For one accession number, a record packages:
metadata.json manifest with form-level metadata, filer entity data, and a complete document inventory;document-N.txt files in submission order;type and free-form description for each document, available via documentFormatFiles[];For initial registrations (S-6EL24), records typically include the prospectus plus several exhibits (commonly three to nine). For pre-effective amendments (S-6EL24/A), records frequently consist of just the amended prospectus, since amendments often refile only the changed document and incorporate prior exhibits by reference.
<DOCUMENT> and submission-header wrappers from the consolidated full-submission .txt are not reproduced at the per-file level; document text is delivered as bare ASCII. The full-submission .txt itself remains accessible via the URL stored in linkToTxt and as the trailing zero/blank-sequence entry in documentFormatFiles[].linkToXbrl and dataFiles[] are empty by construction.seriesAndClassesContractsInformation[] is empty).The S-6EL24 submission type was active for a narrow window — January 1994 through October 1997 — so its required-content envelope did not undergo the kind of multi-decade evolution seen in long-lived forms such as 10-K. Within that window, the substantive disclosure framework was anchored in Form N-8B-2 and Rule 24f-2, both of which were stable over the period. What varies across records is therefore driven mainly by issuer type rather than by regulatory revision: the prospectus of a defined-asset trust series (e.g., a Nike Securities FT series) emphasizes the deposited portfolio and a fixed termination date, while the prospectus of a variable-insurance separate account emphasizes contract charges, available subaccounts, and contract owner rights. Across 1994–1997, the consistent set of required components is the EDGAR cover, items A–H, the Section 8(a) delaying-amendment paragraph, the N-8B-2 cross-reference table, the prospectus body, the statement of condition, and the exhibit complement described above. The submission type was discontinued in October 1997 when EDGAR's filing-type taxonomy was reorganized and the indefinite-registration mechanic was rolled into successor types.
Throughout its 1994–1997 life, S-6EL24 was filed exclusively in EDGAR's pre-HTML ASCII/SGML format. Every record in the dataset is plain text. There is no transition through HTML, inline HTML, or XBRL within the active period of the form, because all of those presentation regimes postdate its retirement. Concretely:
<PAGE> markers;TXT (the documents) and JSON (the metadata manifest).S-6EL24/A records often contain only the amended prospectus and rely on the parent S-6EL24 for the exhibit population. Reconstructing the complete exhibit set for an amended registration may require joining on fileNo (the 333- series Securities Act file number) across the parent and the amendment, then merging the document inventories.documentFormatFiles[].type codes (EX-99.A1, EX-99.A(5)(A), etc.) follow the lettering of Form N-8B-2's exhibit schedule and are not interchangeable with the EX-10, EX-21 taxonomy of operating-company filings. Both punctuated (EX-99.A(5)(A)) and unpunctuated (EX-99.A1) variants of the same exhibit slot occur across filers, so type-code matching should be tolerant of formatting differences.fileNo values typically include both a Securities Act file number (for the registration statement) and, for separate accounts, an Investment Company Act file number on the depositor entity; only the most relevant is surfaced per entity.<PAGE> markers that occasionally split a table across pages.documentFormatFiles[].sequence and the document-N.txt filename is the authoritative way to identify which exhibit type each text file represents.documentUrl and linkTo* fields point to the live EDGAR archive, allowing a record to be cross-checked against the original submission, but the dataset itself is self-contained for textual analysis.Each record is a Securities Act of 1933 registration statement covering units of a UIT. Two parties appear on every filing:
The trustee, which holds the deposited portfolio and administers distributions and redemptions, is identified in the filing but is not the registrant.
UITs (Section 4(2) investment companies issuing redeemable interests in a fixed portfolio) are the only filer class. Open-end mutual funds register on Form N-1A and closed-end funds on Form N-2; neither uses Form S-6 or S-6EL24.
The trigger is offering-driven and transactional, not periodic. UITs do not file Form 10-Ks or 10-Qs, so records appear in two situations:
Because sponsors launched series in clusters (for example, sequential state municipal bond trusts), the dataset shows bursts tied to product-launch cycles rather than a calendar schedule.
Form S-6 is the Securities Act registration form prescribed for UITs already registered on Form N-8B-2; it incorporates the existing 1940 Act registration and adds prospectus and offering-level disclosures. The "EL24" suffix is an EDGAR submission-type label, not a separate form, indicating the trust elected under Rule 24f-2 of the Investment Company Act to register an indefinite amount of securities and pay fees on a back-end basis tied to actual sales, rather than a fixed dollar amount up front.
The dataset is closed: EDGAR retired the S-6EL24 submission type in October 1997 as part of the SEC's overhaul of UIT registration and the indefinite-registration fee regime. No new S-6EL24 or S-6EL24/A filings will be added.
Form S-6EL24 sits at the intersection of three regimes: Securities Act registration of investment company securities, Investment Company Act registration of UITs on Form N-8B-2, and the Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share registration election. The most useful comparisons are the plain S-6 sibling, the underlying N-8B-2 organizational filing, the Rule 24f-2 fee notices, and the post-effective UIT amendment forms (487 and 497).
Same prospectus structure, same UIT filer population, same N-8B-2 anchor. The only meaningful split is the registration mechanic: plain S-6 registers a fixed dollar amount of units; S-6EL24 carries the suffix to flag a Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share election. When EDGAR retired the suffix in October 1997, indefinite-share UITs reverted to plain S-6 filings with separate 24f-2 notices, so plain S-6 is the natural continuation of this dataset after 1997.
N-8B-2 is the one-time Investment Company Act registration that establishes the trust, depositor, trustee, and operational framework. S-6EL24 is the recurring Securities Act offering vehicle that references it. The two are complementary, not substitutable: N-8B-2 gives the organizational record; S-6EL24 gives the prospectus-level offering documents, fee disclosures, and portfolio composition tied to each offering.
Same Rule 24f-2 election triggers both, but the content diverges sharply. Form 24F-2 is a short annual fee-reconciliation filing reporting securities sold and remitting the registration fee retroactively. S-6EL24 is the narrative prospectus and trust agreement filed up front. Use 24F-2 for aggregate UIT issuance volumes; use S-6EL24 for prospectus-level disclosure analysis.
Form 487 is the pre-effective pricing amendment used to bring a UIT registration to effectiveness under Rule 487. Form 497 covers definitive prospectuses and sticker supplements after effectiveness. Both attach to a registration already made on S-6 or S-6EL24. This dataset captures only the initial S-6EL24 filings and their pre-effective S-6EL24/A amendments; for a full lifecycle view through public distribution, pair it with 487 and 497 datasets.
Pre-effective amendments to S-6EL24 statements, typically responding to staff comments or updating portfolio and pricing information. Included in this dataset rather than separated out because they share the same scope and filer population. Treat them as a versioning layer on the initial accession.
Produces a similar-looking prospectus, fee table, and SAI, but for a fundamentally different entity: open-end mutual funds are actively managed, continuously redeemable, and adviser-driven; UITs registered via S-6EL24 are unmanaged, fixed portfolios with a defined termination date. Disclosure content reflects this split (strategies and portfolio managers vs. trust mechanics and trustee provisions). Filer populations are disjoint.
Overlaps with S-6EL24 only at the level of "pooled investment vehicle registered under the Securities Act." Closed-end funds have managed portfolios, secondary-market trading, and ongoing operations; UITs do not. No filer overlap.
The S-6EL24 dataset is distinct on three axes: (1) entity type, restricted to UITs registered on Form N-8B-2 rather than mutual funds or closed-end funds; (2) registration mechanic, restricted to filings electing indefinite-share registration under Rule 24f-2, separating it from fixed-amount plain S-6 filings; and (3) time, a closed January 1994 to October 1997 window matching the lifespan of the EL24 suffix on EDGAR. For coverage outside that window or beyond initial registration, pair it with plain S-6, Form 487, Form 497, Form 24F-2, and Form N-8B-2.
The professionals below each work with a different layer of the prospectus, parties section, statement of condition, fee tables, and governance provisions packaged with each accession.
Counsel advising sponsors, depositors, and trustees use the dataset for precedent drafting on Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share language, depositor role descriptions, fee allocation among unitholders, and substitution and termination mechanics. Pre-effective S-6EL24/A amendments show how staff comments reshaped specific paragraphs across the registration cycle, which is useful when calibrating modern Form N-8B-2 disclosures against the historical baseline.
Compliance teams at firms still servicing, winding down, or inheriting legacy trust series use the dataset to reconstruct original registration records when paper files are incomplete. They rely on the statement of condition, named depositors and trustees, fee disclosures, and governance provisions when a trust is terminated, restructured, merged, or transferred between sponsors.
Analysts extract sales charges, creation and development fees, deferred sales charges, supervisory and bookkeeping fees, and trustee compensation from 1994-1997 prospectuses. The dataset is one of few machine-readable sources for early-1990s UIT fee conventions, supporting comparative fee-trend studies and submissions on long-term cost erosion in pooled products.
Diligence analysts, corporate genealogy researchers, and teams handling escheatment, indemnity, or successor-liability questions use the cover page, parties section, and agent or custodian exhibits to map historical trust series to modern successor entities through chains of mergers and reorganizations.
Teams evaluating the acquisition of a UIT sponsor, depositor, trustee, or back-office servicer use the dataset to confirm registered trust series, residual fee streams, and termination provisions. The statement of condition and fee tables drive cash-flow valuation; governance provisions drive assessment of transfer restrictions, consent requirements, and wind-down conditions.
Researchers studying pooled-product evolution use the dataset as a primary source on the mid-1990s UIT market, when index-tracking trusts, defined-portfolio equity trusts, insurance-funded trusts, and early variable annuity sub-accounts proliferated. They work from the prospectus narrative, stated investment objectives, portfolio composition tables, and unit creation and redemption mechanics.
Empirical researchers use the corpus for studies of registration practice, sponsor concentration, portfolio diversification, and the effect of Rule 24f-2 election. The fixed window and closed submission type make it a stable cross-section, including for case studies on how UIT registration shifted after S-6EL24 was retired in late 1997.
Engineers building financial text corpora use the dataset as a self-contained set of historical filings in plain text with clean metadata and no image artifacts. It supports domain adaptation of financial language models, entity-extraction benchmarks for depositor, trustee, and trust-name mentions, and retrieval evaluation on legacy SGML-era EDGAR submissions. The closed submission type and fixed date range yield a non-drifting evaluation set.
The dataset's narrow scope — UIT registration filings from January 1994 through October 1997 — supports a handful of concrete workflows tied to the prospectus body, statement of condition, fee tables, exhibits, and filer metadata.
Pair each S-6EL24/A record with its parent S-6EL24 by joining on the Securities Act fileNo (typically a 333- series number) in entities[], then merge the documentFormatFiles[] inventories to rebuild the complete exhibit set. This supports counsel and compliance teams that need the full registration package when an amendment refiled only the changed prospectus and incorporated prior exhibits by reference.
Parse fee and expense tables from document-1.txt to pull sales charges, creation and development fees, deferred sales loads, trustee compensation, and evaluator fees by sponsor and year. Because S-6EL24 is one of the few machine-readable sources for mid-1990s UIT fee conventions, the resulting series feeds long-horizon cost-erosion studies and benchmarking submissions on pooled-product fees.
Use entities[].companyName, cik, and stateOfIncorporation together with depositor and trustee identification on the prospectus cover to link historical trust series to current successor entities. This drives escheatment research, indemnity tracing, and successor-liability diligence on UIT sponsors that have since been acquired, merged, or wound down.
Classify records using the prospectus body and the depositor name (e.g., insurance-company separate accounts such as variable life or annuity sub-accounts versus Nike Securities FT-style defined-portfolio series). The two issuer classes have materially different fee disclosures, exhibit populations, and governance terms, and a clean split is a prerequisite for any comparative fee, portfolio, or disclosure analysis.
Index prospectus sections covering the Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share election, mandatory termination dates, in-kind distribution mechanics, and depositor resignation or replacement provisions. Disclosure counsel drafting modern UIT or N-8B-2 filings query this corpus for clause variants and for the staff-driven language changes visible across S-6EL24/A amendments of the same offering.
Use the closed 1994–1997 window and uniform plain-text format as a non-drifting benchmark for entity extraction (depositor, trustee, trust name), section segmentation against the N-8B-2 cross-reference table, and retrieval over SGML-era EDGAR submissions. The absence of HTML, XBRL, and image artifacts makes the corpus suitable for domain adaptation of financial language models without preprocessing variance.
Dataset Index JSON API: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-s6el24-files.json
The dataset index endpoint returns metadata describing the Form S-6EL24 Files Dataset, including the dataset name, description, last update timestamp, earliest sample date, total record and size counters, covered form types (S-6EL24, S-6EL24/A), container format (ZIP), and contained file types (TXT, JSON). It also returns the download URL for the complete dataset archive and a list of individual container files with their size, record count, last updated timestamp, and per-container download URL. This endpoint can be polled regularly to detect which containers were modified in the most recent refresh, enabling incremental download workflows where only changed containers are pulled. This endpoint does not require an API key.
Example response:
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{
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"datasetId": "1f13365b-9ae0-698b-8406-2c79004275d6",
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"datasetDownloadUrl": "https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-s6el24-files.zip",
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"name": "Form S-6EL24 Files Dataset",
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T11:53:58.994Z",
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"earliestSampleDate": "1994-01-01",
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"totalRecords": 4630,
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"totalSize": 90854239,
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"formTypes": ["S-6EL24", "S-6EL24/A"],
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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-s6el24-files/1997/1997-10.zip",
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"key": "1997/1997-10.zip",
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"size": 1842311,
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"records": 47,
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"updatedAt": "2026-04-15T11:53:58.994Z"
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}
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]
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}
Download Entire Dataset: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-s6el24-files.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Use this URL to download the complete Form S-6EL24 Files Dataset as a single ZIP archive containing all monthly containers from January 1994 through October 1997. This endpoint requires an API key.
Download Single Container: https://api.sec-api.io/datasets/form-s6el24-files/1997/1997-10.zip?token=YOUR_API_KEY
Use this URL pattern to download a single monthly container instead of the full archive. Replace the year and month segments to fetch a specific period. This endpoint requires an API key.
The Form S-6EL24 Files Dataset covers EDGAR submission types S-6EL24 (initial registration statements) and S-6EL24/A (pre-effective amendments). Both are Securities Act of 1933 registrations filed by unit investment trusts that elected, under Rule 24f-2 of the Investment Company Act of 1940, to register an indefinite number of securities.
One record corresponds to one EDGAR submission identified by its SEC accession number. Each record materializes as a folder containing a metadata.json manifest (with form-level identifiers, filer entity data, and a complete document inventory) plus one or more sequentially numbered document-N.txt files holding the plain-text content of every non-image document in the original submission.
The legal registrant is the UIT itself — typically a named series within a larger sponsored trust family that is already registered as an investment company on Form N-8B-2. The depositor or sponsor organizes the trust, signs the registration statement, conducts the public offering, and bears principal Section 11 liability. Mutual funds (Form N-1A) and closed-end funds (Form N-2) are outside this filer population.
The dataset covers the entire active life of the S-6EL24 submission type on EDGAR, from January 1994 through October 1997, when EDGAR retired the suffix as part of the SEC's overhaul of UIT registration and the indefinite-registration fee regime. The dataset is closed: no new S-6EL24 or S-6EL24/A filings will be added.
The dataset is distributed as ZIP container archives. Records contain only TXT (the document files) and JSON (the metadata.json manifest) file types. Image attachments from the original submission are excluded; everything else is preserved verbatim as ASCII text, including SGML-era artifacts such as inline <PAGE> page-break markers.
Plain S-6 filings register a fixed dollar amount of UIT units, while S-6EL24 filings carry the EL24 suffix to flag a Rule 24f-2 indefinite-share election with retroactive fee payment. The prospectus structure, filer population, and N-8B-2 anchor are otherwise identical. After the EL24 suffix was retired in October 1997, indefinite-share UITs reverted to plain S-6 filings paired with separate 24f-2 notices.
No. S-6EL24 was retired before XBRL was applied to investment-company filings, so the linkToXbrl field is empty and dataFiles[] is empty by construction. Financial figures in the statement of condition and fee tables are rendered as whitespace-aligned ASCII grids rather than as structured tables, and downstream extraction must handle those columns and the inline <PAGE> markers that occasionally split a table across pages.