Investor Sam turns SEC EDGAR filings into multi-year financial statements, 30+ ratios, forensic accounting checks and a transparent 5-pillar Buy/Hold/Sell rating for 8,200+ U.S. and international companies. Every figure traces back to a document you can open yourself.
Almost everything an ordinary investor needs in order to judge a public company is already free. It sits in the 10-K, the 10-Q and the 20-F that every listed company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The problem has never been access — it is that those documents run to hundreds of pages, are written for accountants and auditors rather than for owners, and bury the three or four numbers that actually decide the question.
This site does one job: it reads those filings, normalises them into clean multi-year statements, computes the ratios and forensic checks a careful analyst would compute by hand, and shows its working. When a number looks wrong, you can trace it to the filing, the period and the accession number it came from. When a score is low, you can see which component dragged it down.
It is not a tip sheet, and there is no model portfolio. We do not publish price targets, we do not take positions we then write about, and we do not tell you what to buy. The rating is a summary of financial condition — a starting point for your own reading, not a substitute for it.
Financial statements come from SEC EDGAR — 10-K, 10-Q, 20-F, 13F and DEF 14A. Macro context comes from FRED at the St. Louis Fed and from World Bank Open Data. Figures are carried as filed. We do not estimate, smooth, or adjust reported numbers to make them comparable.
Every company is scored on Altman Z (distress risk), Piotroski F (fundamental momentum) and Beneish M (earnings-manipulation indicators). These are published academic models with known limitations — notably that Altman Z is not meaningful for banks and insurers, and that Beneish M flags candidates for scrutiny rather than proving anything. We say so on the page rather than in a footnote.
The Buy/Hold/Sell verdict is a deterministic score across five pillars of financial health. It is not a model's opinion: the pillars, their weights and the contributing factors are all shown, so you can disagree with a specific input rather than with a black box.
Narrative summaries are generated from the filing data and reviewed by the editor before they are shown. The scores, ratios and statements are computed arithmetically and never written by a language model. Generated sections are labelled as such.
Not the largest companies — the instructive ones. Each of these teaches something about reading financial statements that a textbook example cannot.
Start at the cash-flow statement, not the income statement. Apple is the clearest case for why buybacks make earnings per share a poor measure of growth on its own.
Banks break most standard ratios. Use it to see why current ratio and Altman Z are close to meaningless for a financial institution, and what replaces them.
A thin net margin that says almost nothing until you pair it with asset turnover and the membership line. The textbook argument against judging a retailer on margin alone.
A deep cyclical. A single-year P/E on a company like this is actively misleading — the multi-year view is the only one that means anything.
A business where the quality question and the valuation question give opposite answers, and the interesting work is holding both at once.
Heavy capital expenditure against declining returns. Read free cash flow rather than net income to see what the reinvestment is actually costing.
A high dividend yield resting on substantial leverage. The case for reading interest coverage before you read the yield.
Patent expiry makes trailing revenue a poor guide to forward revenue. Pharmaceutical accounting rewards reading the pipeline disclosure, not the top line.
Written to teach a method you can apply to any filing, worked through with figures you can look up on this site.
Both British oil majors are up 28–34% this year, yet BP kept 0.03 cents of profit per dollar of sales in 2025 and Shell kept 6.7. A plain-language walk through write-downs, return on equity, debt measured two ways, and interest coverage — and the four checks that catch the difference between any two rivals.
Oil is near $100 and the Bank of Canada is holding at 2.25%, yet Canadian Natural (CNQ) is up 49% and Enbridge (ENB) is down 3%. A plain-language comparison of a producer and a pipeline — margins, return on equity, debt, interest coverage — from their 2025 filings, and why interest rates, not oil, decide Enbridge's year.
Costco (COST) reports fiscal Q4 2026 on September 24. Sales of $93.9bn are already public; the questions are membership-fee growth after the fee increase, comps excluding fuel, gross margin under tariffs, and a possible special dividend. A plain-language preview with the five-pillar verdict (HOLD), the earnings-yield test against a 5% Treasury, and how Costco compares with Walmart, Target and BJ's.
The Fed raised, the Bank of Canada held, the Bank of England split 6–3, and Australia is about to hike again. A plain-language guide to why the same oil shock produced four decisions, what a rate move does to a bank's profits, and the return-on-equity and price-to-book numbers for JPM, BAC, RY, TD, BNS, HSBC, LYG and BCS from their filings.
We pulled every insider Form 4 filing for September 14–22, 2026. Purchases halved, sales halved, and the sell-to-buy ratio did not move — except for Berkshire Hathaway buying $212m of Lennar the three days after the hike, Fox's CEO buying $10m, Truist's CEO buying $1m, and cluster buys at Celsius, Cooper and Star Bulk. What insider buying means, in plain language, with the filings.
The 10-year Treasury yield crossed 5% on September 14, 2026. A plain-English walk through what a higher risk-free rate does to stock prices — the discount-rate math, the earnings-yield test against real P/E data for META, NVDA, AMD, XOM, BAC and others, and how to re-check your own holdings.
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Investor Sam is published by FlossBite LLC for research and education. Nothing here is personalised financial, investment, tax or legal advice, and nothing constitutes a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Always verify against the original filing before acting. Investing carries risk, including loss of principal.