How SEC EDGAR Works — and How This Site Uses It
EDGAR is the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's public filing system. Every listed company must submit its annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports and many other disclosures there, and anyone can read them free of charge.
Modern filings carry XBRL tags: machine-readable labels attached to each reported number identifying what it is — revenue, net income, total assets and hundreds more. The SEC republishes those tagged values through its company facts API, which is the dataset behind every figure on this site. Tagging is what makes honest, large-scale comparison possible without retyping numbers from PDFs.
Tagging is done by filers, and filers differ. Some companies tag revenue under one standard concept, others under a sibling concept; banks and insurers report in formats shaped by their regulators; foreign private issuers may report under international standards with different concepts entirely. Our methodology page explains how we choose among sibling concepts and why a company missing a comparable figure is omitted from a ranking rather than estimated.
EDGAR also teaches humility about single numbers. Companies restate figures, file amendments and change fiscal calendars. The values on this site are the latest filed annual values we retrieved in October 2026, each labelled with its fiscal year, and the original filing remains the authoritative source — every figure here can be traced back to it through the company's EDGAR filing index.
Putting it into practice
EDGAR rewards a few practical skills. Learn a company's CIK number — the permanent identifier this site's data pipeline uses — because names and tickers change while the CIK does not. Learn to filter a company's filing index to Form 10-K so annual reports are not buried among hundreds of routine submissions. And learn to open the financial statements section directly rather than reading a filing from page one. With those three habits, the same public dataset behind this site becomes a personal research terminal, free of charge, covering every listed company in the United States.
A worked example from a real filing
Abstract definitions stick better with a real number attached. Take Nvidia Corp (NVDA): in fiscal 2026 it reported revenue of $215.94 billion in its annual 10-K filing, as republished in the SEC EDGAR company facts dataset retrieved in October 2026. Open its company page and you can place that figure next to the same company's net income, operating cash flow, total assets and diluted earnings per share for the same year — the relationships between the measures, not any single one of them, are where understanding lives. Then compare it with peers in the rankings, where the same measures are lined up across the largest filers.
For the full set of plain-English explainers, return to the Learn index, and for exactly how this site selects and labels figures, read the methodology page.