Where the Studio's Data Comes From

Last updated October 29, 2026·6 min read

Every figure in a Stock Valuation Studio workup starts in one of two places: the company's own filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, or a market data service for the small set of things filings do not carry. This page states which source serves which figure, how the filed figures are chosen, how often each source refreshes, and where each source runs out. The method those figures feed is covered on the companion page, How Stock Valuation Studio Works.

Company Filings Are the Primary Source

The financial statements come from SEC EDGAR, the public filing system. The Studio reads the annual reports on Form 10-K, the quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and their amendments. From those filings it takes revenue, net income, operating cash flow, capital spending, free cash flow, the balance sheet's cash and debt, the share count from the filing's cover, and dividends per share. A ticker is matched to its company through the Securities and Exchange Commission's published ticker map, which ties each symbol to the company's filing identity, so a workup reads the filings of the company the reader asked for and no other.

The feed reads EDGAR under the commission's fair-access rules: it identifies itself by name to the filing system and paces its requests inside the published limit. Nothing is scraped from a display page; the figures come from the structured company facts the commission publishes from the filings themselves.

How Filed Figures Are Chosen

Filings accumulate. A company files an annual report, then amends it, then files quarters that restate the year-to-date picture. The feed applies one basis throughout: the most recently filed figure wins. Restatements are therefore included by construction, and a figure the company later corrected is the figure the Studio uses. Sources that snapshot the first filing will differ from this basis, and the difference is the basis, not an error.

The remaining selection rules are mechanical:

• Annual figures are full fiscal years taken from annual reports. The annual record carries filed fiscal years only; no quarter is ever promoted to a year.
• Balance sheet figures are the latest stated date, and every piece of the balance sheet is read as of that date, so cash and debt describe the same day.
• A filed line whose latest value is far older than the balance sheet date is treated as a dead line and is not used. Old data wearing a current label is worse than an honest blank.
• The trailing twelve months are built from the latest fiscal year plus the current year to date, minus the same period a year earlier. The identity runs over filed figures only; the fourth quarter is taken from the annual figure, where filers themselves report it, so no payment or quarter is silently dropped.
• Free cash flow is operating cash flow plus capital spending, on the filings' own signs, where capital spending prints as a negative figure.
• Per-share figures divide by the current share count, so a buyback shows up in the per-share record as it happens rather than at some later restatement of history.

Market Data for What Filings Do Not Carry

Filings carry no prices, no analyst opinions, and no calendar. The current price, the price history behind the charts and the 52-week range, the dividend payment dates, analyst price targets and estimates, and the next earnings date come from a market data service. Company logos come from a logo library and play no part in any calculation. Each of these fields is labeled by its nature in the workup: an analyst target prints as an analyst target, never as a figure the filings stated.

The forward growth estimate used inside the discounted cash flow model is one of these market figures, the service's next-fiscal-year estimate, and the method page states the discipline on it: an estimate may raise the calibrated growth rate, and it never cuts the company's proven record.

How Often the Data Refreshes

The two sources run on different clocks, matched to how often their contents change:

• Filed figures are rebuilt from the latest filings and held for up to thirty days. Companies report four times a year, so a monthly hold loses nothing, and if a refresh fails, the last good extraction is served rather than a partial one.
• The ticker map refreshes weekly.
• Prices refresh on a five-minute cycle.
• Price history refreshes hourly, and the dividend payment series on a six-hour cycle.

A workup therefore states the company as its latest filings describe it, at a price no more than minutes old.

The Limits of These Sources

The limits are stated plainly, because a reader pricing a stock on these figures should know exactly what stands under them.

• Filings are history. The newest statement period can be weeks past on the day it is filed, and the Studio values the company on the record as filed. No source removes that lag; it is the nature of audited reporting.
• Companies tag their filings in their own ways, and some do not tag a concept at all. Where a filer tags no capital spending concept, the Studio leaves capital spending and free cash flow blank rather than estimating them. JPMorgan is the standing case: it tags no such concept, so its annual and trailing free cash flow print blank.
• A small number of fields fall back to the market data service when the filed line has gone stale past use. Berkshire Hathaway is the standing case: the share count line in its filings ends in 2011 and its cash line in 2017, so those fields are served from the market data service, while its statements, cash flow, and every other field come from its filings. The feed does not guess at a balance sheet a filer states in a non-standard form.
• Analyst estimates exist only where analysts publish them. A company with no coverage carries no forward estimate, and the models that use one rest on the trailing record alone, as the method page describes.
• Prices move while a reader thinks. A workup is a statement made at the price it prints, and the price on the print is the price the verdict used.

None of these limits is hidden in the product. A figure the filings cannot support prints as a state with its reason, and the method falls through to a model the record can feed, exactly as How Stock Valuation Studio Works describes.

Sources

• SEC EDGAR: the filings behind every statement figure in the Studio, and the commission's published ticker map.
• How Stock Valuation Studio Works: the method page, including the testing record for the engine and the audit of the feed's fields against the filings.