[nabentre] reading financial statements

[Kane Brolin]

On 2/16/14, Brandon Keith Biggs <brandonkeithbiggs at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello,
> I would like to start reading financial statements and annual reports of
> businesses, but I can't seem to find them listed for any public
> companies.

Brandon, because Google and Yahoo! would seem to be everywhere in the
world these days, it is natural to think you should go to one of these
sources as your first choice when looking for a publicly traded
company's data filings.  But maintaining this info really is the
province of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the primary
source is EDGAR Online.  EDGAR is an acronym the SEC uses to define
its Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system.  You
can find the home page at http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml.  Believe it
or not, EDGAR Online even has a Twitter feed: @EDGAR_Online.

Brandon, I am totally blind and have had the good fortune to get into
the financial services business, now working as a CERTIFIED FINANCIAL
PLANNER(tm) practitioner.  Part of my job involves researching and
trading individual stocks.  I don't look at SEC filings every day,
since the constraints of my business compel me to default to certain
other brands of premium analysis rather than just what is filed for
public consumption through the SEC.  But I went onto the EDGAR site
just this morning and searched for 8K reports on a company I had
hand-picked--JC Penney & Co. Holdings, to be exact.  To my delight, I
found that you can navigate through the various parts of their
February 8K filing and even the attached exhibits just using Internet
Explorer.  I am thinking we are blessed here as blind readers because
an entity of the federal government is maintaining its records: hence,
its awareness that they need to be made available through an
accessible platform.  It does not look as if you have to interpret an
image file or to use Adobe Acrobat or any other marginally accessible
piece of software to navigate these reports, just your browser.

If you or any other list subscriber feel like asking other questions
related to this kind of topic, feel free to reach out to me off-list,
since I understand that SEC filings of stock companies likely won't
seem relevant to a huge number of list members.  As our community gets
increasingly more employed and prosperous, however, I trust this will
change.

Kind regards,

Kane Brolin