Publicly traded companies are legally obligated to make a lot of information about their business available to potential investors. However, while you can find a lot of valuable documents online, it’s not always easy to understand everything in them. The terminology is complicated, the structure’s unclear, and you suddenly feel like you know less than you did before opening the document. In this course, I will explain to you how to read a 10-K report.
While more informative than the annual report, it might seem too complicated for a first-time reader. Don’t worry: I’m going to guide you through every section. As a professional in accounting and finance with over two decades of experience, I know these processes inside and out. During my career, I have personally filled 10-K reports multiple times. As of now, I am working with many growing companies as a professional finance consultant.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires every publicly traded company to fill out a 10-K report every year. Unlike the annual report that you can often find on the company’s website, it’s neither illustrated nor marketable. The filled reports are placed in the SEC’s online database called EDGAR (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval).
To be honest, understanding how to read a 10-K requires some time and experience. A 10-K report is also more detailed than an annual report and contains a bunch of required sections, including but not limited to the company’s organizational structure, subsidiaries, and executive compensation.
There’s probably no document that reveals this much about a particular company. The main topic of a 10-K report is to reveal the financial situation of the company during a fiscal year and its plans for the future. Knowing how to read a 10-K report allows you to understand how well the company is doing and make an informed decision on whether it’s worth investing.
In the first section of this course, I will introduce you to all the most important concepts found in a 10-K report. I will explain what the sections mean and what you should pay more attention to when reading them. Next, we’re going to move to a case study, in which we will analyze a real 10-K report filled by the omnipresent Apple Inc.
To make sure you fully understand how to read a 10-K report, I have divided the sections into short video lectures, each corresponding with a distinct item in the report. Going through each of them thoroughly, you will learn to find out as much about the company as you can, understand which data matters the most, and what you should absolutely not do when reviewing a 10-K report.
In just over two hours, you will be able to read and interpret the most informative document each publicly traded company has to publish every fiscal year. This will be extremely useful when deciding whether you should buy shares or invest in corporate bonds. Learn to make the smart choice!
Course consist of total 2h 5min of content, in total.
Chris Benjamin is a passionate instructor and management consultant. As a consulting Chief Financial Officer, he helps growth-stage companies to work with investors, do financial modeling, reporting, and analysis and put all the best accounts payable practices. Throughout his over 10 years of experience, Chris has already helped more than 100 startups to succeed.
Chris Benjamin has a passion for sharing his experience with students and teaching online. His focus is on teaching business-related topics like finance, accounting, Excel, and entrepreneurship. Chris is a creator of more than 85 courses and has over 30k students who enrolled in his courses.
Chris holds a Bachelor’s degree in accounting from the University College of the Fraser Valley and an MBA in business from the University of Washington.
On BitDegree, you can find some of the best Chris Benjamin’s courses and expand your knowledge. You can learn such things as economics, finance, public speaking, business management, and others. Choose the best course for yourself and take your skills to the next level in no time!