SEC EDGAR

Industry Terms

EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) is the SEC's online database of filings submitted by public companies, providing free public access to all SEC filings including 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, Form 4, and 13F reports.

EDGAR is one of the most valuable free resources for investors — a complete database of everything public companies are legally required to disclose.

What this tells you

EDGAR is the Securities and Exchange Commission's public filing system — the place where every 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K and related document from a US filer is published, free, to everyone at the same time.

What it does not tell you

A filing date is not a reporting date. A quarter's figures reach EDGAR weeks after the quarter closed, so even perfectly current filing data describes a business as it was, not as it is. The tagging changes too. The accounting taxonomy is revised annually, elements are deprecated, and a figure tagged one way for years can be tagged differently after a revision — which breaks readers that were not watching for it. Foreign private issuers file different forms on different schedules, so a screen built around one form type is silently blind to them. And the deepest limit: a filing records what a company reported. That is a well-defined thing, and it is not the same thing as what is true.