Where Do You Go For Financial Research?
July 2, 2009 by Tisa Silver
Filed under Finance
Where do you go for financial research? Yahoo! Finance, Google, Hoovers and Morningstar are just a few sources for investment research, but perhaps you should consider EDGAR.
EDGAR isn’t a finance guru, it’s the SEC’s Electronic Data Gathering and Retrieval archives.
The Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly traded companies to periodically file certain documents, and the archives are kept electronically on EDGAR.
Photo by dannysullivan, courtesy of flickr
The required filings include:
Form 10-Q – Must be filed each of the first three quarters of each fiscal year. This form contains unaudited financial statements including the balance sheet, income statement and statement of cash flow.
Form 10-K – Must be filed annually. The report contains audited financial statements as well as an overview of the company’s business and financial standing.
Form 8-K – Known as a “current report,” the 8-K must be filed when shareholders need to be made aware of a major event. The events requiring an 8-K range from “completion of acquisition or disposition of assets“ to bankruptcy or receivership. (View the complete list)
EDGAR provides timely versions of these filings and EDGAR is free. You can access EDGAR by visiting www.sec.gov.
