How to find SEC filings that are important to stock market
10-Q is the quarterly report, and accordingly is filed quarterly. Similarly, 10-K is the annual report. 8-K is a general form for notification of material events. It is filed every time a material event is required to be reported to the shareholders. It may accompany the periodical reports, but doesn't have to. It can be filed on its own. If you're only interested in the financial statements, then you should be looking for the 10K/10Q forms. SEC will tell you when the forms were filed (dates), but it won't tell you what's more material and what's less. So you can plot a stock price graph on these dates, and see what was deemed more material by the investors based on the price fluctuations, but be prepared to find fluctuations that have no correlation to filings - because the market as a whole can drag the stock up or down. Also, some events may not be required to be reported to SEC, but may be deemed material by the investors. For example, a Cupertino town hall meeting discussing the zoning for the new AAPL HQ building may be deemed material by the investors, based on the sentiments, even if no decision was made to be reported to SEC.
SEC forms are required when declaring insider activity.  An insider is defined by the SEC to be a person or entity which (i) beneficially owns 10% or more of the outstanding shares of the company, (ii) is an officer or director of the company, or (iii), in the case of insider trading, does so based on knowledge which is not otherwise publically available at the time.  At any rate, the person or entity trading the stock is required to file certain forms. Form 3 is filed when a person first transitions into the status of an insider (by becoming an officer, director, or beneficial owner of a certain percentage of stock). Form 4 is filed when an existing insider trades stock under the company's symbol. Form 5 is filed when certain insider trades of small value are reported later than usual. *More information can be found at the SEC's website. Another possibility is that a large number of options or derivatives were exercised by an officer, director, or lending institution.  In the cases of officers or directors, this would need to be declared with an SEC form 4.  For an institution exercising warrants obtained as a result of a lending agreement, either form 3 or 4 would need to be filed. In addition to the above possibilities, username passing through pointed out a very likely scenario in his answer, as well. For months prior to going public a company has to file financial documents with the SEC. These are available to the public at www.sec.gov on their Edgar database. For instance, Eagleline is listed as potentially IPOing next week. You can find out all the details of any IPO including correspondence between the company and the SEC on Edgar. Here's the link for Eagleline (disclaimer, I have not investigated this company. It is an example only)  https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0001675776&owner=exclude&count=40 The most important, complex, and thorough document is the initial registration statement, usually an S-1, and subsequent amendments that occur as a result of new information or SEC questions. You can often get insight into a new public company by looking at the changes that have occurred in amendments since their initial filings. I highly advise people starting out to first look at the filings of companies they work for or know the industry intimately. This will help you to better understand the filings from companies you may not be so familiar with.  A word of caution. Markets and company filings are followed by very large numbers of smart people experienced in each business area so don't assume there is fast and easy money to be made. Still, you will be a bit ahead if you learn to read and understand the filings public companies are required to make. There are a whole host of types of filings. Some of them are only relevant to companies that are publicly traded, and other types are general to just registered corps in general. ... and many more: http://reportstream.io/explore/has-form Overall, reading SEC filings is hard, and for some, the explanations of those filings is worth paying for. Source: I  am currently trying to build a product that solves this problem. "If by ""most public companies"" you mean ALL public companies. Heck, even some non-public companies have to file 10-Ks.  OP, I'd avoid any exchange-based list (a public company may be de-listed, for example) and go right to the source: Edgar." the financial information is generally filed via SEDAR (Canada) or SEC (US) before the conference call with the investment community.  This can take before either before the market opens or after the market closes.  The information is generally distribute to the various newswire service and company website at the same time the filing is made with SEDAR/SEC. "Wow,  I cannot believe this is a question.  Of course reading the 10Ks and 10Qs from the SEC are incredibly beneficial.  Especially if you are a follower of the investing gurus such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Shelby Davis.  Personally I only read the 10K's I copy the pertinent numbers over to my spreadsheets so I can compare multiple companies that I am invested in.  I'm sure there are easier ways to obtain the data.  I'm a particular user of the discounted free cash flow methodology and buying/selling in thirds. I feel like management that says what they are going to do and does it (over a period of years) is something that cannot be underestimated in investing.  yes, there are slipups, but those tend to be well documented in the 10Qs.  I totally disagree in the efficient market stuff.  I tend to love using methodologies like Hewitt Heisermans "" It's Earnings that Count"" you cannot do his power-staircase without digging into the 10Qs.  by using his methodology I have several 5 baggers over the last 5 years and I'm confident that I'll have more.  I think it is an interesting factoid as well that the books most recommended for investing in stocks on Amazon all advocate reading and getting information from 10Ks.   The other book to read is Peter Lynch's one-up-wall-street.  The fact is money manager's hands are tied when it comes to investing, especially in small companies and learning over the last 6 years how to invest on my own has given me that much more of my investing money back rather than paying it to some money manager doing more trades than they should to get commision fees." "You have to read some appeals court cases see scholar.google.com , as well as SEC enforcement actions on sec.gov to get an understanding of how the SEC operates. http://www.sec.gov/spotlight/insidertrading/cases.shtml There are court created guidelines for how insider trading would be proven There is no clear line, but it is the ""emergency asset injunctions"" (freezing your assets if you nailed a suspiciously lucrative trade) you really want to avoid, and this is often times enforced/reported by the brokers themselves since the SEC does not have the resources to monitor every account's trading activities. There are some thin lines, such as having your lawyer file a lawsuit, and as soon as it is filed it is technically public so you short the recipient's stock. Or having someone in a court room updating you on case developments as soon as possible so you can make trades (although this may just be actually public, depending on the court). But the rules create the opportunities Also consider that the United States is the most strict country in this regard, there are tons of capital markets and the ideals or views of ""illegal insider trading"" compared to ""having reached a level of society where you are privileged to obtain this information"" vary across the board contains charts of countries where an existing insider trading prohibition is actually enforced: http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1053&context=articles https://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2005/BD_The_world.pdf Finally, consider some markets that don't include equities, as trading on an information advantage is only applicable to things the SEC regulates, and there are plenty of things that agency doesn't regulate. So trying to reverse engineer the SEC may not be the most optimal use of energy" I've talked to several very experienced accountants that deal with startup shares, stock 83(b)'s, etc. weekly (based in SF, CA) as this issue would have had a massive impact on me.  The most important part of filing an 83(b) is notifying the IRS within 30 days. The law requires the written notification within the 30 day window. Adding it to that years tax return is an IRS procedure. Forgetting to include a copy of that years tax return is apparently a common occurrence when no tax was owed (0 spread, you actually paid the FMV). And the accepted method to resolve this is to simply file a blank amendment for that years return and include the copy of the 83(b) election. Start by going onto google.com/finance and click through every publicly traded Fortune 500 company. Click on all their charts and look through their graphs for any patters. There will almost always be a pattern even if it is vague and fairly unpredictable. Then look for any jumps or drops in price. Look for the reason of the jump or drop. It could range commonly from news, lay off announcements, acquisitions, etc or just moving along with the market direction for the day. Looking at each stock is key because every stock has its own pattern. Trying to understand the market at a whole is quite impossible, but when you narrow it down to just one stock, it is much more doable. For practice, try updown.com(spent most of my time on it during high school) and create 10-100 accounts and use various techniques for each portfolio.   Just from that, you will have much more practice than the majority of traders. It is all very time consuming, but if you truly try on it, you will do better. I have to go(large market drop today, good time to buy).  I'll answer more questions later! "Google Finance and Yahoo! Finance would be a couple of sites you could use to look at rather broad market information.  This would include the major US stock markets like the Dow, Nasdaq, S & P 500 though also bond yields, gold and oil can also be useful as depending on which area one works the specifics of what are important could vary.  If you were working at a well-known bond firm, I'd suspect that various bond benchmarks are likely to be known and watched rather than stock indices. Something else to consider here is what constitutes a ""finance practitioner"" as I'd imagine several accountants and actuaries may not watch the market yet there could be several software developers working at hedge funds that do so that it isn't just a case of what kind of work but also what does the company do." I agree that a random page on the internet is not always a good source, but at the same time I will use Google or Yahoo Finance to look up US/EU equities, even though those sites are not authoritative and offer zero guarantees as to the accuracy of their data. In the same vein you could try a website devoted to warrants in your market.  For example, I Googled toronto stock exchange warrants and the very first link took me to a site with all the information you mentioned.  The authoritative source for the information would be the listing exchange, but I've spent five minutes on the TSX website and couldn't find even a fraction of the information about that warrant that I found on the non-authoritative site. There are about 250 trading days in a year. There are also about 1,900 stocks listed on the NYSE.  What you're asking for would require about 6.2M rows of data. Depending on the number of attributes you're likely looking at a couple GB of data.  You're only getting that much information through an API or an FTP. "This information is clearly ""material"" (large impact) and ""non-public"" according to the statement of the problem.  Also, decisions like United States v. Carpenter make it clear that you do not need to be a member of the company to do illegal insider trading on its stock. Importantly though, stackexchange is not a place for legal advice and this answer should not be construed as such.  Legal/compliance at Company A would be a good place to start asking questions." Just look at the filing date of the 10Q and then Yahoo the closing price or Google it. I assume you are looking for market reactions to SEC filings?   If you want to look at the closing stock price for the end of the period which the filing covers, it's like on the first page of the filing when the period (either quarterly or yearly) ends. This data is generally less useful, however, because it really is just another day in the market for the company. The actual release of the data to the public is more important. Every listed company needs to maintain book of accounts, when you are investing in companies you would have to look at what is stated in the books and along with other info decide to invest in it.