Company Lookup

Type a ticker to see ten years of a company's sales, profit, and share count, plus what its executives have been buying and selling - pulled from the company's own SEC filings and explained in plain language.

Look up a company

Works for companies that file annual reports (10-Ks) with the SEC - most stocks listed in the U.S.

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Numbers are exactly as each company reported them to the SEC, adjusted only for stock splits. There are no live stock prices here - for those, see where to look up stocks. A new lookup takes a few seconds, since it reads up to 30 filings. This is research, not investment advice.

Reading the Numbers

Six things to look at, in the order I'd look at them. None of them alone tells you whether a stock is a good buy.

Revenue: is the business growing?

Revenue (or sales) is all the money customers paid the company in a year, before any costs. Steady growth over many years usually means people want more of what it sells. One down year isn't a disaster; a long slide often is.

Net income and profit margin

Net income is what's left after every cost, interest payment, and tax. Divide it by revenue for the profit margin - how many cents of each sales dollar the company keeps. Margins differ a lot by industry (grocers keep a few cents, software companies far more), so compare a company with its own past and with similar companies.

EPS and the share count

Earnings per share is net income split across every share. It can rise even when profit doesn't, if the company buys back its own stock and the share count shrinks. A share count that keeps growing means new shares are being issued (often as employee pay), and each existing share owns a little less of the company.

Cash from operations

Accounting rules let companies count some sales and costs before cash changes hands, so profit and cash can drift apart. Cash from operations is the money the business actually brought in. Over several years it should roughly keep up with net income. Banks are the exception - their cash flow swings with loans and deposits.

Liabilities and shareholder equity

Liabilities are everything the company owes - loans, bonds, bills, and more. Shareholder equity is what would be left for owners if it sold everything at its accounting value and paid those debts. More liabilities per dollar of equity means more risk if business slows. Normal levels vary by industry, and equity can even go negative at companies that spend heavily on buybacks.

Trends beat single years

One-time events - a lawsuit, a tax change, selling a division - can swing a single year's profit wildly. Look at the whole run of years. And remember these numbers describe the past; a stock's price is a bet on the future, so a great company can still be an expensive stock.

What Insider Trades Tell You

Executives, directors, and big owners have to report when they buy or sell their own company's stock. Here's how to read those reports.

Form 4: reported within two business days

Officers, directors, and anyone owning more than 10% of a company's stock must file a Form 4 with the SEC within two business days of a trade. It's public the moment it's filed, which is where the trades above come from.

Buys say more than sells

Insiders sell for all kinds of ordinary reasons - paying taxes, buying a house, spreading out their savings - since much of their pay comes as stock. A buy with their own cash is rarer and harder to explain away. Peter Lynch, who ran Fidelity's Magellan fund, put it as: insiders might sell for any number of reasons, but they buy for only one.

Planned sales (Rule 10b5-1)

Many insider sales happen under a 10b5-1 plan: a schedule set up months in advance, so the timing isn't based on anything the insider knows today. The table marks these. They tell you even less than an ordinary sale.

What's left out, and why

Most Form 4s aren't trades at all: stock awarded as pay, stock options being exercised, shares held back to cover taxes, and gifts. None of those is a choice to buy or sell at the market price, so this page only counts open-market buys (code P) and sells (code S). Counting everything would make insiders look like they're dumping stock when they aren't.

Don't copy-trade insiders

By the time a Form 4 is public, the trade is already done, and one person's purchase can be a small part of their wealth or a personal bet that doesn't work out. Treat insider activity as one clue to look into, not a reason to buy or sell. See Scams & Fraud for "insider tip" schemes that use this idea to sell you something.

Key Terms

The filing and accounting words used on this page.

SEC filings

SEC and EDGAR: The Securities and Exchange Commission regulates U.S. stock markets. EDGAR is its free public database of every filing public companies make.
10-K: The yearly report a U.S. public company files, with audited financial statements and a description of its business and risks. Every number in the year-by-year table comes from one.
Form 4: The report an insider files after trading the company's stock, listing the date, number of shares, price, and how many shares they own afterward.
XBRL: The tagging system that makes filings machine-readable, so a program can find "net income" without reading the whole report. It's how this page gets its numbers.
Fiscal year: A company's 12-month accounting year. Many match the calendar year; others don't - Apple's ends in late September, for example. The table labels each year by the month it ended.

Shares and insiders

Diluted shares: The average number of shares during the year, counting stock options and similar rights as if they had become shares. It's the count diluted EPS is based on.
Stock buyback: A company buying its own shares on the market, which shrinks the share count and gives each remaining share a larger slice of the profits.
Stock split: Turning each share into several cheaper ones (a 4-for-1 split turns 1 share at $400 into 4 at $100). Nothing about the business changes. Older filings show pre-split numbers, so this page converts them so years can be compared.
Insider: For Form 4 purposes, a company's officers, its directors, and anyone owning more than 10% of a class of its stock.
10b5-1 plan: A written plan to buy or sell shares on a set schedule, adopted before the trades and while the insider has no inside information. Officers and directors must wait at least 90 days after adopting one before it can trade.

Picking individual stocks takes this kind of research for every company you own. For most people, a low-cost index fund is the simpler start - see Beginner ETFs.