How Filing.fyi reads a filing.

1. What we pull, and from where

• SEC EDGAR. Annual reports (10-K), quarterly reports (10-Q), current reports (8-K), insider transactions (Form 4), and institutional holdings (Form 13F). We pull directly from the SEC. We do not buy aggregated filing data from a vendor.
• yfinance. Delayed (15+ minute) closing prices, basic ratios, market capitalization, and historical price series. Every yfinance-derived field is free for all users; we do not paywall it and we do not market on it.
• FRED (St. Louis Fed). Macro indicators rendered in the daily Market Pulse band — VIX, 10-year Treasury yield, Shiller CAPE proxy, equity risk premium.
• News headlines. RSS-licensed headlines only. We do not scrape news bodies and we do not store article text.

2. Forensic scores — what they are and where they came from

The forensic suite on every ticker page is a set of mechanical, peer-reviewed scores. They are computed from the company's own filed numbers. They are not predictions.

These methods were developed for academic research, sometimes decades ago. They can produce inconsistent results across industries, can be miscalibrated against today's accounting standards, and can be wrong. Treat them as one input among many, not as a proof of anything.

3. Verdict labels — what they actually mean

Filing.fyi uses four verdict labels, plus a directional chip. The labels are editorial categorizations, not regulated ratings.

• Deep Value — the forensic suite is clean and the implied valuation gap is wide. Does not mean the security is a bargain or that it will appreciate.
• Fairly Valued — the implied valuation gap is narrow. Does not mean the price is correct or that the company is safe.
• Watch — at least one forensic score is flashing yellow. Does not mean you should take any action.
• Red Flags — multiple forensic scores are flashing red. Does not mean fraud has occurred or that the company will fail.

We deliberately do not use "Buy," "Hold," or "Sell." Those words imply a personalized recommendation, which Filing.fyi cannot make and is not licensed to make. See our Terms, §3–§5.

4. The synthesis — how the prose gets written

The "Synthesis" section on each ticker hub is a multi-paragraph readthrough of the most recent material filing. It is generated by a third-party large-language-model API, with provider fallbacks, using a fixed editorial prompt grounded in the filing text and the computed forensic scores. The prompt is calibrated on the framework of Howard Marks, Benjamin Graham, and Ray Dalio — not on social-media sentiment.

No human edits the synthesis prose. The model can be wrong, can be internally inconsistent, and can hallucinate. Where it cites a passage from the filing, the citation is anchored to a character offset in the filing — if a passage is not anchored, treat it as paraphrase, not quotation. Drag-to-highlight on any sentence opens the comment composer with the passage attached.

5. Refresh cadence

• Forensic scores + synthesis. Recomputed when a new 10-K, 10-Q, or material 8-K is detected on EDGAR for a covered ticker. Cached for at least 7 days.
• Market Pulse. Recomputed daily at 5:00 PM ET on weekdays.
• Delayed price data (yfinance). Recomputed daily at 6:00 PM ET on weekdays. Free for all users.
• Top losers screen. Recomputed daily at 5:30 PM ET on weekdays.
• News headlines. Pulled on page render with a short cache.

We do not push intra-day refreshes and we do not surface live ticks. If you need real-time pricing for execution, use your broker.

6. What we do not do

• We do not provide personalized investment advice. The custom-query feature has hard-coded refusals for "should I buy / given my $X / for my IRA" patterns.
• We do not market on price moves. You will never see "rallied," "surged," or "up X%" in our list pages, hero copy, or pricing page.
• We do not bulk-export yfinance-derived data.
• We do not trigger watchlist alerts on raw price moves — only on filing events and forensic-threshold crossings.
• We do not edit the substance of user comments. We approve, reject, or shadow.
• We do not pretend to be a registered investment adviser. We are not.

7. Limitations and known risks

• The forensic scores were developed on different decades' data and may be mis-calibrated for current accounting standards (IFRS / new SFAS, restated comparables).
• The synthesis prose is LLM-generated and can be wrong. Always verify a load-bearing claim against the underlying filing.
• The Buffett Indicator and Shiller CAPE rendered in the Market Pulse band are approximations. The true CAPE requires a 10-year inflation-adjusted earnings history we do not currently maintain.
• Insider transaction data from Form 4 can be filed late or amended; we do not retro- actively correct.
• We do not cover every public US ticker. Coverage is rolled out per-ticker and gated on the uniqueness and quality of the generated synthesis.

8. Corrections

If you believe a score, a citation, or a sentence in a synthesis is wrong, email hello@filing.fyi with the ticker, the URL, and what you think the correct answer is. We will look at it. If the underlying inputs from the filing are wrong, we will rerun the pipeline; if the LLM produced a hallucination, we will note the correction and adjust the prompt.

Methodology changes are reflected by updating the "Last reviewed" date above and, when material, by a note in the RSS feed.