Sec Ftd MCP server

@pipeworx/sec-ftd

SEC fails-to-deliver (CNS) data. Keyless.

Part of Pipeworx — an MCP gateway connecting AI agents to 1576+ live data sources.

Tools

• ftd_security(symbol, periods?) — fails history for one ticker across recent half-month files.
• ftd_largest(period?, limit?) — the biggest fails in one reporting period.
• ftd_periods() — which periods SEC has published (currently 408, back to 2009).

The semantics are the point of this pack

A fail-to-deliver is a settlement failure — shares not delivered by the settlement date. The SEC says, where it publishes this file, that fails are not evidence of naked short selling. Ordinary causes include processing delays, order-entry mistakes, illiquidity in thinly traded securities, and long sales where the seller's shares did not arrive in time.

There is a loud audience that wants the opposite inference. So the framing is not a footnote: it is in every tool description and rides on every response as whatthisis and notevidenceof. An agent that reads only the payload still cannot honestly draw the naked-shorting conclusion.

Two more reading traps, both surfaced in the responses themselves:

settlement date across all participants. Summing days over-counts a fail that persists, which is why ftdsecurity returns peaksharesfailed alongside the total and says so in readingnote, and why ftd_largest ranks by each security's worst single day rather than a sum.

• The published number is cumulative, not daily-new. It is total shares failing on that

exceed the reporting threshold, so "no rows" means no reportable fails — not that nothing failed and not that the ticker is unknown. The found: false path says exactly that.

• Absence is not a clean bill of health. SEC lists a security on a date only when its fails

Data source and cadence

https://www.sec.gov/data-research/sec-markets-data/fails-deliver-data — one pipe-delimited file per half month (a = 1st–15th, b = 16th–month end), zipped. Measured 2026-08-25: the current file (cnsfails202607b.zip) is 1.65 MB zipped, 4.6 MB raw, 73,340 rows, covering 13,500 securities. SEC posts a period a few weeks after it closes.

Each call reads the periods the question needs straight from SEC, so currency is simply whatever SEC has published — ftd_periods reports it. A request spanning many periods costs one fetch per half month, which is why periods is capped at 6.

Two upstream traps worth knowing

/files/data/fails-deliver-data/, older ones under /files/data/other/fails-deliver-data/ — verified 2026-08-25, where cnsfails202605b.zip 404s on the first prefix and 200s on the second. The pack reads SEC's index page rather than guessing.

• The path is not constructible. Recent files live under

both sizes. A reader that trusts the local header extracts nothing. Sizes are taken from the central directory, which always has the real values.

• These ZIPs set the data-descriptor flag (0x08), so the local file header carries zeroes for

Quick Start

Add to your MCP client (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, etc.):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "sec-ftd": {
      "url": "https://gateway.pipeworx.io/sec-ftd/mcp"
    }
  }
}

What this endpoint actually serves

tools/list at https://gateway.pipeworx.io/sec-ftd/mcp returns the tools in the table above plus the shared Pipeworx meta-tools — askpipeworx, discovertools, search_within, remember/recall and the rest of the gateway-wide set. So the tool count you see is larger than this table: a single-pack endpoint currently lists roughly 30 shared tools alongside the pack's own. The connection's initialize response states its exact scope, and is the authoritative answer for a given day.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.