Investor Sam publishes financial research that people may act on with their own money. This page states where our numbers come from, who checks them, how we use AI, how we correct mistakes, and how we make money. It is written to be held to.
Company financial statements come from filings made with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and retrieved from SEC EDGAR — principally Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 20-F, plus Form 4 for insider transactions, 13F for institutional holdings and DEF 14A for executive compensation. These are public-domain documents.
Macroeconomic context, including the risk-free rate, comes from FRED, published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Global development indicators come from World Bank Open Data under CC-BY 4.0. Market prices and related market data come from commercial providers under their respective terms.
Figures are carried as filed. We do not estimate, smooth, restate or adjust a reported number to make companies look comparable. Where a company's own filing is internally inconsistent, we prefer showing nothing to showing a figure we cannot source.
Ratios, forensic scores and the five-pillar rating are computed arithmetically from filed figures. They are deterministic: the same inputs always produce the same output, and every contributing factor is shown on the page so the result can be argued with rather than taken on trust. The formulas and their limitations are set out in full on our methodology page.
Written guides are researched and drafted against primary sources, worked through with real figures, and reviewed by the editor before publication.
Some narrative summaries on company pages are generated from the filing data by a large language model and reviewed by the editor before they are shown. Those sections are labelled on the page. We do not hide that they are generated, and we do not present them as a person's independent judgement.
AI is never used to compute a number. Every score, ratio and financial-statement line on this site is arithmetic over filed data. A language model cannot change a rating, and it is not permitted to introduce a figure that is not already in the underlying data.
Our long-form guides are written by the editor, not generated. We do not publish scraped, spun or automatically generated articles.
Company data is refreshed as new filings are published; each company page shows the date its data is current to and the date its analysis was last computed. Guides carry a publication date and a last-updated date, and are revised when the law, the figures or our method changes.
Where a page depends on figures that change annually — contribution limits, tax brackets, rate thresholds — those figures are tracked against the date the issuing authority publishes new ones, so a stale number is caught by schedule rather than by chance.
If something here is wrong, we want to know. Write to [email protected] with the page and the figure in question.
Substantive corrections — anything that changes a number, a rating or a conclusion — are made on the page and noted there, with the date. We do not quietly edit a published claim and leave the original date standing. Typographical and formatting fixes are made without a note.
Investor Sam is published by FlossBite LLC and funded by subscriptions, advertising and, at times, affiliate links. Advertisers and affiliate partners have no access to, influence over or advance sight of editorial content, company ratings or scores. No company can pay to change its rating, to be covered, or to avoid coverage.
The editor holds positions in some of the companies covered on this site. Where a holding is relevant to a specific piece of writing, it is disclosed on that piece.
We do not accept payment for coverage, sponsored posts presented as editorial, or guest articles placed for links.
Investor Sam is a research and education service. It is not a registered investment adviser, broker-dealer or financial planner, and nothing published here is personalised financial, investment, tax or legal advice. We publish no price targets, no model portfolio and no trade recommendations.
A rating on this site is a summary of financial condition computed from filings. It is a starting point for your own reading of the primary documents, not a substitute for it, and not a recommendation to buy or sell. Investing carries risk, including the loss of principal. Consult a qualified, licensed professional before acting.