Researching Public Companies

What is a public company?

A public or publicly held company is one that sells stock to the general public and is traded on a stock exchange. There is a great deal of information available on public companies because they are required to file financial disclosure forms with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in regular intervals. These filings are the basis for most of the data that is available to the general public.

How do I find out on the internet whether a company is publicly held?

The first step in researching a public company is to identify the stock exchange ticker symbol. The Yahoo Ticker Symbol Lookup will identify the ticker symbol for a company. If the ticker symbol is not listed on Yahoo then the company is probably privately held. If the company that you are looking for is a subsidiary of a public company then you will be able to find more information if you focus your research on the parent company.

Once a company is determined to be publicly held, Yahoo Finance uses resources such as Reuters, Businesswire, PR Newswire, and Market Guide to provide company profiles, stock quotes and charts, financial information, SEC filings, and news articles. Other similar web sites include Quicken.com, Microsoft's MoneyCentral, and CBS MarketWatch.

SEC's Edgar Site This site contains information that publicly traded companies in the United States are required by law to submit to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Until May 6, 1996, companies had the option of filing electronically, and some did not do this. A large quantity of useful information is provided in company filings, which can often be hundreds of pages in length. Useful filings include 10-Ks, which are filed annually and 10-Qs, which are filed quarterly. The site's search engine is very unreliable it is strongly recommended that you use one of the following sites, as they carry the same data, but allow you to find it reliably.

• 10-K Wizard - Allows full text (And fast) searches of company filings. Great if you are looking for a particular person, or a specific brand or product.
• Edgar Scan - Extracts financial data from Edgar filings easily. Just type in a company name, and then you get links to their financial data, and all of it is hyperlinked. You can also download excel spreadsheets with a company's financial data which is very helpful if you are doing financial analysis and need the data.
• Edgar Online - Can be searched by personal name. To get full access to the daily filings you must subscribe to the site.

Other sources of information on public companies:

• Silicon Investor - Contains good profiles of many tech stocks - mostly extracted from the 10K reports. Also provided are the results (revenues, net income, profit margin, EPS) for the most recent quarters, P/E, Price/Sales, market cap. Stock charts (100 days, 100 weeks and 60 months) also available.
• PRARS (The Public Register's Annual Report Service) - Links to over 1000 free annual reports, some in full image format, including most of the Fortune 500 companies. A similar site is IRIN (Investor Relations Information Network).
• Daily Stocks - A mega-site that links to other sites, this website is organized into 17 categories (news, commentary, IPOs, etc.) each with dozens of links to other sites specializing in that category's topic.
• Over the Counter Bulletin Board - This site is run by NASDAQ and contains the most current information on the trading status of individual penny stocks.