Sources: company IR, EDGAR, free screeners, and what paid data adds

Everything in this course can be done with free data. The difference between free and paid is mostly speed, convenience and history, not access to something secret. This lesson lists where each input comes from, in the order you should trust it, and what you get for paying.

The hierarchy of sources

Trust flows from primary to secondary. When two sources disagree, the one higher in this list wins.

1. The company's own filings on EDGAR. The 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K, Form 4, proxy and offering documents. Audited (annual) or reviewed (quarterly), legally attested by the officers, and the source from which every other number is derived. Free, and searchable by company name or ticker at sec.gov. EDGAR's full-text search covers filings back several years and is the fastest way to find, for example, every 8-K mentioning "at-the-market".

2. The company's investor relations site. Press releases, earnings slides, the transcript or replay of the earnings call, the confirmed earnings date, and often a "fact sheet" with historical financials in a spreadsheet. The earnings call is the most under-used free source: management's tone, the questions analysts ask, and the questions management dodges are all there. Read the Q&A section at minimum.

3. Exchange and regulator data. Short interest (published by the exchanges twice a month), index change announcements (from the index providers), and central-bank data for rates, spreads and lending surveys. All free.

4. Aggregators and free finance sites. Consensus estimates, ratio calculations, earnings calendars, insider transaction summaries, 13F summaries, ETF holdings. Convenient and usually right, but derived, sometimes stale, and occasionally wrong about things like share counts and adjusted versus GAAP figures. Verify anything you are sizing a trade on against the filing.

5. News and commentary. Useful for knowing what the crowd is talking about; useless as a source of numbers. Always the lowest tier.

Key idea: The filing is the source; everything else is a copy. When a trade depends on a number, check the number in the filing.

Free tools that cover the course

That table covers every input in the module 7 checklist. A trader with a browser and a broker account has what they need.

Screeners

A screener filters a universe of stocks by criteria. It is the fastest way to apply the module 1 filter to the whole market rather than one stock at a time. A useful free screen for the long side of this course:

The last row is the technical overlay. Run it weekly; it produces a list of perhaps 100 to 300 names, and your technical scan works from that list instead of from the whole market. The order matters: fundamentals filter first, technicals time second.

Screener numbers are derived data (tier 4). Before any trade from a screen, open the filing for items you are relying on.

What paid data adds

Paid services range from a few dollars a month to tens of thousands a year. What the money buys, roughly in order of usefulness to a swing trader:

Estimate revision history and the full distribution. Free sites show the current consensus. Paid data shows each analyst's number, when they changed it, and the trend over 30, 60 and 90 days. This is the input to the whisper (module 4) and the drift trade, and it is the single paid feature most worth having for an earnings-focused trader.

Earnings-reaction history and implied-move archives. How the stock moved on each of the last twelve reports and what the options implied each time. Reconstructable for free from charts and memory; tedious.

Transcripts, searchable across companies. Being able to search every earnings call in a sector for the phrase "pricing pressure" in the last month is a real edge for read-across trades (module 7, lesson 1, item 20).

Clean, standardised financials with history. Paid databases reconcile adjusted and GAAP figures, restate for splits and spin-offs, and go back decades. Free portals cover five years and occasionally mangle a line.

Real-time filing alerts. An 8-K or Form 4 pushed to you within seconds of filing. EDGAR itself offers free RSS feeds per company; paid services add filtering and speed.

Short-interest estimates daily rather than twice monthly, and borrow-cost data. Important for anyone shorting; irrelevant for most longs.

What paid data does not add: a signal. No dataset tells you that a stock will rise. The value is in doing the same work faster and across more names. A trader who has not built the process with free data will not be saved by paying for a faster version of it.

Spend on data only after a few months of free-data trading and a log that shows which input you are actually using; if earnings trades dominate the log, an estimate-revision service is the usual first purchase. Most of the edge in this course lives in the checklist, the invalidation, and sizing from the stop, and all three cost nothing.

Try it: Set up free EDGAR RSS alerts for the five companies you trade most. Build the eight-line screen above on any free screener and run it. Open the 10-Q for the first result and complete the fifteen-minute read. You now have the full free pipeline from screen to filing to checklist.

Recap

• Trust flows from the filing (EDGAR) to company IR to exchange and regulator data to aggregators to news; verify sized numbers against the filing.
• Every input in this course is available free; the earnings call Q&A is the most under-used free source.
• Screen on fundamentals first, then apply technicals to the result.
• Paid data buys speed, history and breadth (revision history, transcript search, standardised financials), not a signal.
• Pay for data only after the trade log shows which input you actually use.