The SEC filing is a financial statement or other formal document submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Public companies, certain insiders, and broker-dealers are required to make regular SEC filings. Investors and financial professionals rely on these filings for information about companies they are evaluating for investment purposes. Many, but not all SEC filings are available online through the SEC's EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval) database and as structured datasets in the Harvard Dataverse.
Common filing types The most commonly filed SEC forms are the 10-K and the 10-Q. These forms are composed of four main sections: the business section, the F-pages, the Risk Factors, and the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A). The business section provides an overview of the company, the F-pages contain the financial statements which are either audited or reviewed by an independent auditor, the Risk Factors are a list of all of the potential risks that exist for the company, and the MD&A contains a narrative about the financial results of the company. This narrative is also accompanied by management's expectations for the upcoming year.
Form name Description F-1 Registration statement for certain foreign private issuers Form D An exempt offering of securities under Regulation D 3 Initial statement of beneficial ownership (insider transactions) Other filings are required with respect to offerings by private companies.
All filing types The filings accepted by the SEC as of November 2011 are: