Library Guides: MGT 490: Company Research

Getting Started with Company Research

Identify the complete, official name of the company: A company's common name (for example, McDonald's) may not be its official name (McDonald's Corporation). When possible, use the company's complete official name as your search term.
Find the company's ticker symbols: Ticker symbols are letter codes that stand for specific publicly traded companies on stock exchanges and indices. Using a ticker symbol when searching for information is helpful for accuracy.
- Yahoo! Finance Symbol Lookup
Find the company's investor website: Publicly traded companies provide annual reports and required disclosures on their investor relations webpages, and often include additional materials related to corporate governance. A simple Google search for the company name + "investor relations" can help you locate these resources on a company website.

Company Profiles & Financial Information

Company Profiles are sources of comprehensive information about a company's overall operations. These resources will often provide details about a company's executive leadership, board, investors, supply chain, financials, and more.

Company Financials are easily located in official documents from the Securities Exchange Commission for U.S. publicly-traded companies. There is generally much more information available about publicly traded companies than those which are privately held.

Mergent Online
Find a Company Profile by entering the company name or ticker symbol in the basic search field.
This database contains corporate information on over 25,000 U.S. public companies, over 35,000 foreign public companies, and over 34,000 private companies. Information available for each public company includes: A complete corporate history; Lists of subsidiaries, property holdings, and key personnel; Up to 25 years of annual and quarterly financial data; Up to 10 years of scanned, full-image annual reports, including SEC filings; Extensive information about the corporation's current long term debt; Links to recent news reports; Reports on insider and institutional owners; current and historical (past 15 years) firm descriptions, statistics, financial information and ratios, annual reports, mergers, acquisitions, disposals, joint ventures, long-term debt, capital stock, and insider trading. A variety of search options are available, including company name, ticker symbol, executive's name, auditor, country code, NAICS or SIC industry code, and selected financial characteristics and ratios.
NetAdvantage
Most comprehensive source of public company information. Search by company name or ticker symbol. to find Company Profiles and Company Financials.
Updated daily. Provides a comprehensive, professional source of investment information and analysis on industries and companies. Full text coverage includes stock, bond, and mutual fund guides and reports; earnings and dividends reports; comprehensive company information; industry surveys for 52 major U.S. industries; and directories of companies, executives and security dealers
Business Source Complete
Find company profiles, SWOT analyses, and articles from scholarly and professional publications.
Access full-text articles from thousands of scholarly business journals, magazines, and trade journals from the fields of marketing, management, accounting, finance, and economics. Plus company and industry profiles, SWOT analyses, country economic reports, financial data, and investment reports. This database includes rigorous curation and indexing of open access (OA) journals. Full-text non-journal content includes company profiles, informational records, case studies, industry reports, business executive interviews, working papers, and over 75,000 videos from the Associated Press.

SEC Filings for Company Research

Public companies in the US are required to file annual, quarterly, and current reports based on SEC regulations. Annual and quarterly reports include financial information for the period covered by the report. Item 1 of annual reports includes risk factors that inform overall macroenvironment analyses.

Form Type	Description
10-K	This is a company's annual report. It provides audited annual financial statements, a discussion of material risk factors for the company and its business, and a management’s discussion and analysis of the company’s results of operations for the prior fiscal year.
10-Q	These are quarterly reports. A 10-Q includes unaudited quarterly financial statements, updates regarding material risks that the company faces, and management’s discussion and analysis of the company’s results of operations for the prior fiscal quarter.
8-K	Current reports which disclose material events or information that the company chooses or is required to make public prior to its next scheduled quarterly or annual report.

Source: EDGAR Guide

EDGAR
EDGAR indexes all required SEC filings of publicly traded companies. Search by company name.
The United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) provides access to millions of informational documents filed by publicly traded companies in their Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval (EDGAR) system. This database provides automated collection, validation, indexing, acceptance, and forwarding of submissions by companies. EDGAR Resources include a list of Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Codes, used to indicate a company's type of business; a search engine to find Central Index Key (CIK) numbers assigned to filers; a Public Dissemination Service (PDS); RESTful data Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that include the submissions history by filer and the XBRL data from financial statements; and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Feeds for EDGAR submissions to view, analyze, and manipulate filings.

How to Read a 10-K
A guide to understanding the kinds of information available in companies' 10-K reports