How to read a 10-K: where every number on TickerVerdict comes from

Every figure on a TickerVerdict comparison — revenue, margins, debt, free cash flow — comes from documents that companies are legally required to file with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Nothing is estimated and nothing comes from a data vendor's model. That has a useful consequence for you: anything we print, you can check in the same documents. This guide shows where to look, what to skip, and how we turn a stack of filings into the "trailing twelve months" figures you see on every page.

The two filings that matter: 10-K and 10-Q

A US-listed company files a 10-K once a year and a 10-Q for each of the other three quarters. The 10-K is the big one: audited financial statements, a full description of the business, a long list of risks, and management's own discussion of the year. A 10-Q is shorter and unaudited, but it carries the same three financial statements for the quarter and for the year to date. Large companies must file a 10-K within 60 days of their fiscal year-end and a 10-Q within 40 days of each quarter, so the data is never more than a few months behind.

The phrase "fiscal year" matters more than it sounds. Coca-Cola's year ends in December, but Apple's ends in late September, Microsoft's in June, and Nvidia's in late January — Nvidia's fiscal 2026 ended in January 2026, when most people were still thinking about calendar 2025. When we say a company's latest fiscal year is 2026, we mean the year that ended in 2026 under its own calendar. Comparing two companies "for 2025" without checking this is one of the most common mistakes in amateur analysis, which is why every comparison page states the date its figures run to for each company separately.

The sections worth reading first

A 10-K can run to a few hundred pages. You do not need most of them. Four sections do almost all of the work:

• Item 1, Business. What the company actually sells, to whom, and how it is organised into segments. Read this before any number — a margin means nothing until you know whether you are looking at a software licence or a bottling plant.
• Item 1A, Risk Factors. Mostly boilerplate, but the risks that are new since last year are worth noticing. Companies rarely add a risk factor for no reason.
• Item 7, Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A). Management explains why revenue, costs and cash moved. This is where you learn whether a margin improved because of pricing, product mix or a one-off gain.
• Item 8, Financial Statements and notes. The audited numbers, plus the notes that explain them. The notes on debt, segments and income taxes are the ones we return to most.

The three statements, and which line each of our metrics uses

The financial statements are three tables that describe the same business from different angles. Our metrics combine them:

Coca-Cola is a clean example. Over the twelve months to 3 April 2026 it reported revenue of $49.3bn and operating income of $14.5bn — an operating margin of 29.3% — with net income of $13.7bn and free cash flow of $12.6bn. Each of those is one line, or one subtraction, away from the statements in its filings. You can see how they line up against PepsiCo's in our Coca-Cola vs PepsiCo comparison.

Trailing twelve months: building a current year from old reports

Annual figures go stale quickly. By October, a December year-end company's last 10-K describes a year that ended ten months ago. So for income and cash-flow figures we use the trailing twelve months (TTM): the most recent four quarters, whatever calendar they fall on.

Companies never report a fourth quarter on its own — it is buried inside the annual total — so TTM has to be assembled:

Here is Coca-Cola's revenue, built exactly that way from its filings:

That $49,284 million is the $49.3bn on our pages. Balance-sheet figures need no such arithmetic, because a balance sheet is a snapshot: we simply take the latest quarter's. One more detail matters here. Growth rates are measured differently, between complete fiscal years — three-year revenue growth compares the latest full year with the one three years earlier — so a single unusual quarter cannot distort them.

XBRL: the machine-readable layer underneath

Since the late 2000s every number in a 10-K or 10-Q has also been filed in XBRL, a format in which each figure carries a standard label from the US-GAAP taxonomy. Net income is tagged NetIncomeLoss; revenue is usually tagged Revenues or a longer label for revenue from contracts with customers. The SEC publishes all of it as free, structured data, and that is what our figures are read from.

The labels are standard, but companies are not identical, and the exceptions are where errors creep in:

• Tags change over time. Apple reported revenue as SalesRevenueNet for years, briefly as Revenues, and since then under the label for revenue from contracts with customers, so a long growth history needs all three joined together.
• Not every company reports an operating-income line. Pfizer does not, so for Pfizer we use earnings before interest and tax, built from pre-tax income plus interest expense, and the page says so.
• Banks do not report "revenue" the way a manufacturer does. Bank of America tags a total of its net interest income and non-interest income, which gives revenue of $119.2bn; JPMorgan's latest quarterly filings carry no such total that our reader finds, so for JPMorgan we add the two components ourselves. How to read a bank is a subject of its own, covered in how to compare bank stocks.
• Figures are restated. When a later filing revises an earlier number, the later filing wins.

When a number cannot be read reliably we leave it out rather than guess. That policy, with real examples, is set out in the numbers we refuse to print.

What filings cannot tell you

Filings describe the business, not the stock. There is no share price in a 10-K, so every valuation multiple on our pages combines filed figures with an exchange closing price, and every page states that price's date. Filings contain no analyst forecasts either, which is why you will not find a forward P/E anywhere on this site. And they cannot tell you whether today's price is a good one — that judgement is yours. To read the filings for yourself, the SEC's free EDGAR full-text search finds any company's 10-K and 10-Q in seconds.

A 30-minute routine for any annual report

You can learn most of what matters in half an hour if you read in the right order:

1. Start with MD&A, not the statements. Learn management's explanation first, then test it against the numbers.
2. Compare revenue growth with operating-income growth. If profit grows much faster than sales, ask whether margins can keep expanding; if it grows slower, ask what is eating them. Our guide to revenue versus earnings growth shows both cases with real companies.
3. Put net income next to cash from operations. Profit that never turns into cash deserves suspicion. Free cash flow yield explains why we lean on cash.
4. Read the debt note. Look at when the debt matures and at what interest rate, not just how large it is.
5. Check the share count across years. Rising counts mean dilution; falling counts mean buybacks are doing part of the work in per-share growth.
6. Skim the risk factors for anything new.

Once you have done this for one company, our comparison pages become a shortcut rather than a substitute: they put the same figures for two companies side by side, and our six-factor score applies one consistent set of rules to them. How we source and check everything is set out in our editorial policy.