Starting from zero · Course 6 of 11 · Stage 2
What a company must tell you
The forms, the deadlines, the item codes and the search tools. Eight lessons that end with a reader able to find any US filing and know what it is for.
A reader who can work through a 10-K still does not know what else a company files, when, or where to find it. That is this course.
It is the one that makes a reader able to check us. Every filed figure this product publishes names a filing, a fiscal year and a filing date, and none of that is worth anything to somebody who cannot open the document and look.
The eight lessons
The first two are the system. What the 1933 Act governs and what the 1934 Act governs, then EDGAR itself: the index, the form types, the full-text search and the accession number that pins a figure to a document.
Lessons three to five are the periodic filings. The annual report and the quarterly one, with the deadlines each filer status carries. The current report and its item codes. And the proxy statement, which is where pay, directors and the auditor appear.
Lessons six and seven are the filings other people make about a company: insiders under Section 16, large holders under Schedules 13D and 13G, restricted sellers under Rule 144, and the different calendar a foreign private issuer runs on. Lesson eight is the auditor's report, which is shorter than most readers expect and asserts less.
Every example is a real document
Caterpillar supplies the filing index, the deadlines, the 8-K item codes, the proxy and the audit report. Walmart supplies a corporate action. Toyota and Canadian National supply the foreign issuer forms. Every accession number in the course resolves on sec.gov, and readers are meant to open them.
What this course does not do
It does not interpret the filings it teaches you to find. There is no view on any company in it and no view on any security.
It is also not legal advice. Filing obligations, deadlines and thresholds are set by rules that change, and every lesson cites the form or rule by name so the current text can be read rather than this page.
The tools, not the work
What a company must tell you is 8 lessons on the arithmetic and the rules an investor has to be able to handle: the discounting, the probability, the standards, the tax. They are what you work WITH. None of them is work done on a company you own, and a tool understood is not a book checked.
Related
- How to read a 10-K is the previous course's guide to the document itself, in the order worth reading it.
- Writing an asset down is one of the notes this course teaches you to find, decoded in full.
- Company catalogue is every covered company with the filings behind its figures named.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.