Reading a 10-K
The three financial statements, which of our metrics comes from each, and why we build everything from SEC filings.
Every US public company files an annual report with the Securities and Exchange Commission called a 10-K. It is the most complete, most reliable document a company produces about itself: audited financial statements, a description of the business, its risks, and management's own discussion of the results. Quarterly updates arrive in a shorter filing called a 10-Q. Everything on this site is derived from the numbers in these filings, retrieved directly from SEC data, because the filing is the primary source — every data vendor, news article, and screener is downstream of it, and each step downstream is a chance for numbers to be adjusted, relabeled, or simply wrong.
The heart of a 10-K is three financial statements, and each answers a different question. The income statement asks: what did the company earn this period? The balance sheet asks: what does it own and owe at this moment? The cash flow statement asks: where did cash actually come from and where did it go? The three are linked — profit from the income statement flows into equity on the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement reconciles reported profit to the change in actual cash — but each can look healthy while another deteriorates, which is exactly why you need all three.
The income statement runs from revenue at the top to net income at the bottom. Revenue is what customers paid; subtracting the direct cost of goods sold gives gross profit; subtracting operating expenses (R&D, sales, administration) gives operating income; and after interest and taxes, net income remains. From this statement we compute revenue growth (the 3-, 5-, and 10-year CAGRs), the margin ladder — gross margin, operating margin, net margin — and diluted earnings per share, whose growth we track over 5 and 10 years. The margins tell you how much of each revenue dollar survives each layer of cost; the growth rates tell you whether the whole engine is expanding.
The balance sheet is a snapshot: assets on one side, liabilities and shareholders' equity on the other, always in balance because equity is defined as whatever remains after liabilities are subtracted from assets. From it we take cash and equivalents, long-term debt, total assets, net property plant and equipment, and equity. These feed our leverage metrics (debt to equity, debt to FCF, cash to debt), our return measures (ROE, ROA, and cash ROIC, which uses equity plus long-term debt as invested capital), and our capital-intensity measures (PP&E to revenue, and the sales-efficiency ratio that tracks how much new PP&E each dollar of new revenue required).
The cash flow statement is the one professionals trust most, because it is the hardest to shape with accounting judgment. It has three sections. Operating cash flow starts from net income and adds back non-cash items (depreciation, stock-based compensation) and working-capital changes, arriving at the cash the business actually collected. Investing cash flow contains capital expenditures — the money spent on equipment and facilities. Financing cash flow shows dividends paid, share repurchases, and debt raised or repaid. From this statement we compute free cash flow (operating cash flow minus capex) and everything built on it: FCF margin, FCF yield, FCF growth, debt to FCF, SBC to FCF, the payout ratio, dividend and buyback yields, and the reverse-DCF implied growth.
A note on fiscal years: companies choose their own year-end, so Apple's fiscal 2025 ends in September while Walmart's fiscal 2025 ends in January. Our data is organized by fiscal year as reported, and metrics labeled 'latest' refer to the most recent completed fiscal year, not the most recent quarter. This means our figures can lag current conditions by up to a year — a deliberate trade: annual figures are audited, complete, and free of seasonal noise, at the cost of freshness. One further adjustment we make: old filings report share counts and EPS as they stood at the time, without restating for later stock splits, so we detect split boundaries and adjust historical shares and EPS to make per-share series comparable across time.
When you open an actual 10-K, the financial statements sit in Item 8, but two other sections repay reading. Item 1A, Risk Factors, lists what management is legally obliged to warn you about — most of it boilerplate, but the specific, unusual entries are informative. Item 7, Management's Discussion and Analysis, is where management explains in prose why revenue and margins moved, and it is the first place to look when one of our red flags triggers: if gross margin compressed or revenue declined, the company's own explanation is here.
The practical workflow this site is built around: use the computed metrics to find companies worth attention and to spot the questions — a declining margin, a rising share count, a debt load that grew. Then go to the filing itself for answers. The metrics compress fifteen years of statements into a screenable summary; the 10-K holds the context no summary can carry. Neither substitutes for the other.