Understanding SEC Filings
The most important filings are: Form 10-K, which is the annual report required by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and Form 10-Q, for the interim quarters. There are a whole host of types of filings. Some of them are only relevant to companies that are publicly traded, and other types are general to just registered corps in general. ... and many more: http://reportstream.io/explore/has-form Overall, reading SEC filings is hard, and for some, the explanations of those filings is worth paying for. Source: I  am currently trying to build a product that solves this problem.
I use 10-K and 10-Qs to understand to read the disclosed risk factors related to a business. Sometimes they are very comical. But when you see that risk factor materializing you can understand how it will effect the company. For example, one microlending company's risk factor stated that if Elizabeth Warren becomes head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau we will have a hard time... so we are expanding in Mexico and taking our politically unfavorable lending practices there. I like seeing how many authorized shares there are or if there are plans to issue more. An example was where I heard from former employees of a company how gullible the other employees at that company were and how they all thought they were going to get rich or were being told so by upper management. Poor/Quirky/Questionable/Misleading management is one of my favorite things to look for in a company so I started digging into their SEC filings and saw that they were going to do a reverse split which would make the share prices trade higher (while experiencing no change in market cap), but then digging further I saw that they were only changing the already issued shares, but keeping the authorized shares at the much larger amount of shares, and that they planned to do financing by issuing more of the authorized shares. I exclaimed that this would mean the share prices would drop by 90%-99% after the reverse split and you mean to tell me that nobody realizes this (employees or the broad market). I was almost tempted to stand outside their office and ask employees if I could borrow their shares to short, because there wasn't enough liquidity on the stock market! This was almost the perfect short but it wasn't liquid or have any options so not perfect after all. It traded from $20 after the reverse split to $1.27 I like understanding how much debt a company is in and the structure of that debt, like if a loan shark has large payments coming up soon. This is generally what I use those particular forms for. But they contain a lot of information A lot of companies are able to act they way they do because people do not read. This study introduces XBRL-enhanced digit analysis as a possible new approach to identify firm-year observations suspect of having manipulated earnings. Based on all available XBRL 10-K filings submitted to the SEC between 2009 and 2012, we find that firms likely to have managed earnings exhibit a higher amount of abnormal digit frequencies compared to other firm-years. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2297355 "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/18/investing/rio-tinto-coal-mine-fraud/index.html) reduced by 83%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; Authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. have accused Rio Tinto.  &gt; The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission claims that Rio Tinto realized the mine was worth significantly less within a year of purchasing it, but did not share that information with investors until 2013.  &gt; In its complaint filed Tuesday, the SEC accused Rio Tinto, Albanese and Elliott of trying &amp;quot;To conceal the rapid and dramatic decline in value&amp;quot; of the coal business.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/77ct0m/rio_tinto_accused_of_fraud_over_3_billion_coal/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~231113 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **Tinto**^#1 **Rio**^#2 **mine**^#3 **company**^#4 **SEC**^#5" "This is the best tl;dr I could make, [original](http://thehill.com/policy/technology/344410-feds-eye-crackdown-on-digital-coin-investments) reduced by 89%. (I'm a bot) ***** &gt; At issue are initial coin offerings, where new companies or smaller projects seek to crowdfund - or raise investment funds from the public - through crypto online currencies.  &gt; In their report, the SEC warned investors to make sure a coin offering is registered properly if it is a securities exchange, and to learn about their rights and level of control, as well as to understand potential cybersecurity threats.  &gt; &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re the right people to look at it this sort of thing, says Peter Van Valkenburgh director of research at Coin Center, a research and advocacy group focused on digital currencies.&amp;quot;Creating token and selling them is like selling portions of businesses.   ***** [**Extended Summary**](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/6qotdi/feds_eye_crackdown_on_digital_coin_investments/) | [FAQ](http://np.reddit.com/r/autotldr/comments/31b9fm/faq_autotldr_bot/ ""Version 1.65, ~179906 tl;drs so far."") | [Feedback](http://np.reddit.com/message/compose?to=%23autotldr ""PM's and comments are monitored, constructive feedback is welcome."") | *Top* *keywords*: **coin**^#1 **SEC**^#2 **currency**^#3 **offered**^#4 **security**^#5" "Without divulging too many specifics.  Net income is 73k.  Total income is 136k.  Filed as an S-Corp.  Using Quickbooks to classify expenses etc.  I know its not much information but I don't know what to look out for, like ""whoa, net income is 73k, you gotta spend that!""  I have a CPA but isn't offering much in the terms of ""help"" and ""explanation"".  Thanks for your time!" "First, don't use Yahoo's mangling of the XBRL data to do financial analysis.  Get it from the horse's mouth: http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html Search for Facebook, select the latest 10-Q, and look at the income statement on pg. 6 (helpfully linked in the table of contents).  This is what humans do. When you do this, you see that Yahoo omitted FB's (admittedly trivial) interest expense.  I've seen much worse errors. If you're trying to scrape Yahoo... well do what you must.  You'll do better getting the XBRL data straight from EDGAR and mangling it yourself, but there's a learning curve, and if you're trying to compare lots of companies there's a problem of mapping everybody to a common chart of accounts. Second, assuming you're not using FCF as a valuation metric (which has got some problems)... you don't want to exclude interest expense from the calculation of free cash flow.  This becomes significant for heavily indebted firms. You might as well just start from net income and adjust from there... which, as it happens, is exactly the approach taken by the normal ""indirect"" form of the statement of cash flows.  That's what this statement is for.  Essentially you want to take cash flow from operations and subtract capital expenditures (from the cash flow from investments section).  It's not an encouraging sign that Yahoo's lines on the cash flow statement don't sum to the totals. As far as definitions go... working capital is not assets - liabilities, it is current assets - current liabilities.  Furthermore, you want to calculate changes in working capital, i.e. the difference in net current assets from the previous quarter.  What you're doing here is subtracting the company's accumulated equity capital from a single quarter's operating results, which is why you're getting an insane result that in no way resembles what appears in the statement of cash flows.  Also you seem to be using the numbers for the wrong quarter - 2014q4 instead of 2015q3. I can't figure out where you're getting your depreciation number from, but the statement of cash flows shows they booked $486M in depreciation for 2015q3; your number is high. FB doesn't have negative FCF." This is fine, but I'd probably spend a moment introducing WACC and it's estimation. It's also useful to link up the enterprise value to share price, so just also mentioning the debt subtraction to get equity value and division by shares for price.  Keep in mind you're usually given like a minute to answer this, so you can afford to be a bit more detailed in some parts. There's a lot of hate on the SEC in this thread, but having had to deal with various daily reports generated by several different clearing firms -- I think a story about of all the different methods of delivery and file formats used in the industry would be worthy of TheDailyWTF.  There seriously needs to be some industry standardization here.  It's a nightmare for everyone involved.