A trader’s guide to SEC filings

By Active Trader Staff
Given the new push by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to protect individual investors against fraud and improve transparency, you might expect the agency to simplify its massive database of financial information on U.S. public companies.

To its credit, the SEC has overhauled the way it collects and distributes financial reports, but these recent changes will only help large institutional investors and savvy researchers. Individual investors who try to navigate through thousands of reports submitted to the SEC each day are mostly on their own.

Fortunately, the key fundamentals of any public company are easy to find in current annual or quarterly reports posted on its Web site or resources such as Yahoo Finance.

But if you want to dig deeper and track every critical development in a stock — from sudden changes (think Jay Leno and Conan O’Brien) to the latest investments from large players such as Warren Buffett and George Soros, you need to know how companies submit news to the SEC.

For the complete article, see the April 2010 issue of Active Trader magazine. Click here to subscribe.



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