How to find SEC filings that are important to stock market
10-Q is the quarterly report, and accordingly is filed quarterly. Similarly, 10-K is the annual report. 8-K is a general form for notification of material events. It is filed every time a material event is required to be reported to the shareholders. It may accompany the periodical reports, but doesn't have to. It can be filed on its own. If you're only interested in the financial statements, then you should be looking for the 10K/10Q forms. SEC will tell you when the forms were filed (dates), but it won't tell you what's more material and what's less. So you can plot a stock price graph on these dates, and see what was deemed more material by the investors based on the price fluctuations, but be prepared to find fluctuations that have no correlation to filings - because the market as a whole can drag the stock up or down. Also, some events may not be required to be reported to SEC, but may be deemed material by the investors. For example, a Cupertino town hall meeting discussing the zoning for the new AAPL HQ building may be deemed material by the investors, based on the sentiments, even if no decision was made to be reported to SEC.
"First, I applaud you for caring.  Most people don't!  In fact, I was in that category.   You bring up several issues and I'll try to address them separately. (1) Getting a financial planner to talk with you.  I had the same experience!  My belief is that they don't want to admit that they don't know how things work. I even asked if I could pay them an hourly fee to ask questions and review stocks with them.  Most declined.  You'll find that very few people actually take the time to get trained to evaluate stocks and the stock market as a whole.  (See later Investools.com). After looking, however, I did find people who would spend an hour or two with me when we met once a quarter to review my ""portfolio""/investments.  I later found training that companies offered.  I would attend any free training I could get because they actually wanted to spend time and talk and teach investors. Bottom line is: Talking to their clients is the job of a financial planner.  If he (or she) is not willing to take this time, it is in your best interest to find someone who will spend that time. (2) Learning about investing! I'm not affiliated with anyone.  I'm a software developer and I do my own trading/investments.  The opinions I share are my own. When I was 20 years away from retirement, I started learning about the stock market so that I would know how it worked before I retired so that (a) I could influence a change if one was needed, and (b) so I wouldn't have to blindly accept the advice of the ""experts"" even when the stock market is crashing. I have used Investools.com, and TDAmeritrade's Think-or-Swim platform.  I've learned a tremendous amount from the Investools training.  I recommend them.  But don't expect to learn how to get rich from them or any training you take. The TDA Think-or-swim platform I highly recommend BECAUSE it has a feature called ""Paper Money"".  It lets you trade using the real market but with play money.  I highly recommend ANY platform that you can use to trade IN PAPER money! The think-or-swim platform would allow you to invest $30,000 in paper money (you can have as much as you want) into any stock.  This would let you see if you can make more money than your current investment advisor.  You could invest $10K in one SPY, $10K in DIA and $10K in IWM (these are symbols for the S&P 500, Dow 30, and Small Cap stocks).  This is just an example, I'm not suggesting any investment advise! It's important that you actually do this not just write down on a piece of paper or Excel spreadsheet what you were going to do because it's common to ""cheat"" and change the dates to meet your needs.  I have found it incredibly helpful to understand how the market works by trying to do my own paper and now real money investing. I was and you will be surprised to find that many trades lose money during the initial start part of the trade because it's very difficult to buy at the exact right time. An important part of managing your own investments is learning to trade with rules and not get ""emotionally involved"" in your trades. (3) Return on investment. You were not happy with $12 return.  Low returns are a byproduct of the way most investment firms (financial planners) take (diversification).  They diversify to take a ""hands off"" approach toward investment because that approach has been the only approach that they have found that works relatively well in all market conditions.  It's not (necessarily) a bad approach.  It avoids large losses in down markets (most riskier approaches lose more than the market).  The downside is it also avoids the high returns.  If the market goes up 15% the investment might only go up 5%. 30K is enough to give to multiple investment firms a try.  I gave two different firms $25K each to see how they would invest.  The direction was to accept LOTS of risk (with the potential for large losses or large gains). In a year that the market did very well, one lost money, and one made a small gain.  It was a learning experience.  I, now, have taken the money back and invest it myself. NOTE: I would be happy with a guy who made me 10-15% year over year (in good times and bad) and didn't talk with me, but I haven't found someone who can do that. :-) NOTE 2: Don't believe what you hear from the news about the stock market being up 5% year to date.  Do your own analysis. NOTE 3: Investing in ""the market"" (S&P 500 for example) is a great way to go if you're just starting.  Few investment firms can beat ""the market"" although many try to do so.  I too have found it's easier to do that than other approaches I've learned.  So, it might be a good long term approach as well. Best wishes to you in your learning about the market and desires to make money with your money.  That is what is all about." "The assumption that companies listed OTC are not serious is far from the truth. Many companies on the OTC are just starting off there because they don't meet the requirements to be listed on the NASDAQ or NYSE. Major stock exchanges like the NASDAQ and the NYSE only want the best companies to trade on their exchanges.The NASDAQ, for example, has three sets of listing requirements. A company must meet at least one of the three requirement sets, as well as the main rules for all companies. These include: Now don't assume that the OTC doesn't have rules either, as this is far from the truth as well. While there are no minimum level of revenue, profits or assets required to get listed on the OTC there are requirements for audited financial statements and ongoing filing and reporting to the SEC and NASD. Additionally there are several different levels of the OTC, including the OTCQX, the OTCCB and the OTC Pink, each with their own set of requirements. For more information about what it takes to be listed on OTC look here: http://www.otcmarkets.com/learn/otc-trading A company deciding to trade on the OTC is making the decision to take their company public, and they are investing to make it happen. Currently the fees to get listed on the OTC range from $30,000 to $150,000 depending on the firm you decide to go with and the services they offer as part as their package. Now, I know I wouldn't consider $30K (or more) to not be serious money! When I looked into the process of getting a company listed on the TSX the requirements seemed a lot more relaxed than those of the major U.S. markets as well, consisting of an application, records submission and then a decision made by a TSX committee about whether you get listed. More information about the TSX here: http://apps.tmx.com/en/listings/listing_with_us/process/index.html I think the way that the OTC markets have gotten such a bad reputation is from these ""Get Rich on Penny Stock"" companies that you see pumping up OTC company stocks and getting massive amounts of people to buy without doing their due diligence and investigating the company and reading its prospectus. Then when they loose a bunch of money on an ill-informed investment decision they blame it on the company being an OTC stock.  Whether you decide to trade the OTC market or not, I wouldn't make a decision based on how many exchanges the company is listed on, but rather based on the research you do into the company." "Matt explains the study numbers in his answer, but those are the valuation of the brand, not the value of the company or how ""rich"" the company is.   Presuming that you're asking the value of the company, the usual way for a publicly traded company to be valued is by the market capitalization (1).  Market capitalization is a fairly simple measure, basically the total value of all the shares of stock in that company. You can find the market cap for any publicly traded company on any of the usual finance sites like Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. If by rich you mean the total value of assets (assets being all property, including cash, real property, equipment, and licenses) a company owns, that information is included in a publicly traded company's quarterly SEC filing and investor releases, but isn't usually listed on the popular finance sites. An example can be seen at Duke Energy's Investor Relation Site (the same information can be found for all companies on EDGAR, the SEC's search tool).  If you open the most recent 8-K (quarterly filing), and go to page 8, you can see that they have $33B+ in assets, and a high level breakdown of those. Note that the numbers are given in millions of dollars For a privately held company this information may or may not be available and you'd have to track it down if it is available. I picked Duke Energy because it's the first thing that popped into my mind.  I have no affiliation with Duke, and I don't directly own any of their stock." I am not interested in watching stock exchange rates all day long. I just want to place it somewhere and let it grow Your intuition is spot on! To buy & hold is the sensible thing to do.  There is no need to constantly monitor the stock market. To invest successfully you only need some basic pointers. People make it look like it's more complicated than it actually is for individual investors. You might find useful some wisdom pearls I wish I had learned even earlier.  Stocks & Bonds are the best passive investment available. Stocks offer the best return, while bonds are reduce risk. The stock/bond allocation depends of your risk tolerance. Since you're as young as it gets, I would forget about bonds until later and go with a full stock portfolio. Banks are glorified money mausoleums; the interest you can get from them is rarely noticeable. Index investing is the best alternative. How so? Because 'you can't beat the market'. Nobody can; but people like to try and fail.  So instead of trying, some fund managers simply track a market index (always successfully) while others try to beat it (consistently failing). Actively managed mutual funds have higher costs for the extra work involved. Avoid them like the plague.  Look for a diversified index fund with low TER (Total Expense Ratio). These are the most important factors. Diversification will increase safety, while low costs guarantee that you get the most out of your money. Vanguard has truly good index funds, as well as Blackrock (iShares).  Since you can't simply buy equity by yourself, you need a broker to buy and sell. Luckily, there are many good online brokers in Europe. What we're looking for in a broker is safety (run background checks, ask other  wise individual investors that have taken time out of their schedules to read the small print) and that charges us with low fees. You probably can do this through the bank, but... well, it defeats its own purpose.  US citizens have their 401(k) accounts. Very neat stuff. Check your country's law to see if you can make use of something similar to reduce the tax cost of investing. Your government will want a slice of those juicy dividends. An alternative is to buy an index fund on which dividends are not distributed, but are automatically reinvested instead.  Some links for further reference:  Investment 101, and why index investment rocks: However the author is based in the US, so you might find the next link useful.  Investment for Europeans: Very useful to check specific information regarding European investing. Portfolio Ideas: You'll realise you don't actually need many equities, since the diversification is built-in the index funds.  I hope this helps! There's not much more, but it's all condensed in a handful of blogs. Assuming the data you're referring to is this line: the difference might be related to the different exchanges on which the stock trades.  FINRA could be listing the reported volume from one exchange, while the NASDAQ data might be listing the volume on all exchanges. This is an important distinction because AAV is a Canadian company that is listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange and the NYSE. The Q at the end of the line stands for NASDAQ, according to FINRA's codebook for those data. My guess is that the FINRA data is only reporting the volume for the NASDAQ exchange and not the total volume for all exchanges (Toronto, NASDAQ, NYSE, etc.) while the data straight from NASDAQ, oddly enough, is reporting the total volume. However, FINRA could also face reporting discrepancies, since it's a regulatory body and therefore might not have the most up-to-date volume data that the various exchanges can access.  I don't know if it's related or not, but looking at the NASDAQ historical data, it looks like the volume on March 6, the day you're asking about, was much lower than the volume in most of the days immediately before or after it. For all I know, something might have happened that day concerning that particular stock or the market as a whole. I don't remember anything in particular, but you never know. I find the reg, at last. https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=Cornerstone+Strategic+Value+Fund&owner=exclude&action=getcompany Yes, its a common stock. You can check whether the company whose stock you want to buy is present on an european market. For instance this is the case for Apple at Frankfurt. You can use Google Finance Stock Screener for screening US stocks. Apparently it doesn't have the specific criterion (Last Price % diff from 52 week low) you are (were!) looking for.  I believe using its api you can get it, although it won't exactly be a very direct solution.