SEC Documents: A Financial Analyst's Best Friend

Title: SEC Documents: A Financial Analyst's Best Friend

Speaker:

• Barbara (Bobbi) Coffey, Finance Research Librarian, Research Services, Scholarly Collections and Research Services, Princeton University Libraries

Description:

There are a handful of documents public companies need to file with the SEC periodically. These documents, while steeped in legalese, contain a great amount of information. This session walks through the different documents and the content that they contain. The data from these SEC documents are often extracted and accessed entirely electronically. This is needed when analyzing many companies at once. Looking at the source documents adds a level of understanding that looking just at the extracted numbers cannot convey. For instance, if there is a change in control, how much does the current management team stand to make as a result? Or is the company leasing land from the company’s founder? The goals for this session are to increase your familiarity with the relevant sources, and to demystify the SEC documents. For those accustomed to doing company research, this will likely be a review, but for those who only have looked at the extracted numbers, there is much to learn from the documents. This session will be led by a librarian with extensive finance research experience. The goal of this session is to demystify the financial documents that companies file with the SEC.