Data sources / Filings and registries

SEC EDGAR

Public filings submitted to the SEC. A private business may appear as an issuer, subsidiary, acquisition counterparty, customer or other entity mentioned inside a registrant's disclosure.

Last reviewed 14 October 2026 · report an error

Publisher: U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
Access: Free
Coverage: Public filings submitted to the SEC. A private business may appear as an issuer, subsidiary, acquisition counterparty, customer or other entity mentioned inside a registrant's disclosure.
Identifiers: CIK; Accession number; Form type
Freshness: Event-driven and periodic filings; the relevant reporting period can predate submission.
Official URL: https://www.sec.gov/edgar/search/

What it can establish

Use SEC EDGAR for a defined acquisition-research question. Match each record to the right entity using its identifiers (CIK, Accession number, Form type) before accepting its contents, and keep U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's own scope and attribution on the finding.

The statements a registrant made in a particular filing, including disclosed acquisitions, subsidiary relationships and material agreements.
Filing dates, document types and issuer identity, allowing a company reference to be traced to a specific disclosure rather than a search snippet.

What it cannot establish

A complete universe of private acquisition targets; many private businesses have no relevant public filing.
Current ownership from an old exhibit alone, or independently verified financial statements for every private company mentioned in a filing.

A search that returns nothing in SEC EDGAR describes the search performed. Coverage here is public filings submitted to the SEC, so a missing record becomes a negative finding only where that coverage reaches the company in question and the evidence standard supports the inference. Otherwise the question stays open.

How Docket uses it

Your acquisition criteria become the agents' questions. SEC EDGAR can support some of them and leave others unanswered; its freshness (event-driven and periodic filings; the relevant reporting period can predate submission) is weighed answer by answer and it receives no blanket reliability score.

Triage. Distinguishes a named subsidiary from a similarly named independent business using entity and address context.
Scout. Collects the precise ownership or activity statement from the filing, retaining its reporting period and surrounding language.
Audit. Checks whether a quoted relationship actually applies to the target and whether a later retained disclosure changes it.

Scout records typed answers from a fixed list with verbatim quotations from retained pages. Audit reviews only the retained material, with every fetch tool denied. It settles supported contradictions, strikes unquotable answers and leaves gaps visible. See the research-agent method and screening criteria guide for the surrounding workflow.

Pitfalls and review questions

Full-text matches can identify a customer or a lawsuit party rather than the target's owner. Read the role assigned in the document.
A filing's presence does not mean the SEC has endorsed its commercial claims. Keep attribution to the registrant explicit.

How to search it in practice

EDGAR can be searched by company name, by Central Index Key, by form type and by full text. The full-text search covers the body of recent filings, which makes it the right tool for finding a private company named inside a public registrant's disclosure, such as an acquisition, a customer or a litigation counterparty. Searching by the registrant's own identifiers is better when the question is about the registrant itself. Start with the identifier where one exists, since names collide.

For automated work the SEC publishes programmatic interfaces that return filing metadata as structured data, and its access page sets a fair-access request rate and expects efficient scripting. Follow those rules and declare the client honestly. Retain each downloaded filing with its accession number and the retrieval date, because the number identifies one submission and amendments are separate submissions.

Reading a filing

Different forms answer different questions. Annual and quarterly reports describe the registrant's business, risks and results. Current reports announce events such as acquisitions. Registration statements contain business descriptions and often a list of the principal selling or controlling holders. Exhibits hold contracts and the list of subsidiaries, whose requirements come from the exhibit rules in the disclosure regulations. Each part has an author and a purpose, and the section heading matters as much as the text.

Industry codes are assigned to every registrant, and the SEC publishes the list. They describe the registrant's own classification and can lag a change in strategy. When a private company appears in a filing, record the role the document gives it, the date of the statement and the filing's reporting period, and do not generalise from one mention to current ownership.

Illustration (fictional)

A researcher searching for Tin Kite Field Services in full-text results finds a registrant's annual report that lists it among acquisitions completed two years earlier. The researcher opens the filing, copies the sentence with its section name and reporting period, and records that Tin Kite appears to be a subsidiary of the registrant as of that date. A later search finds no subsidiary exhibit mention in the next year's filing, so the status is recorded as unconfirmed for the current period and routed to a registry check.

Filings and registries

SEC Form D

The issuer identity, related persons and offering information reported in a specific notice or amendment.

Filings and registries

State business registries

Legal existence, registered name, entity identifier and the particular status or filing information made public by that jurisdiction.

Company-published

Company websites

What the identified company publicly says about its services, footprint, customers or ownership on a retained page.

Sources and further reading

EDGAR Application Programming Interfaces, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The programmatic access points to filing metadata and the SEC's fair-access expectations for automated requests.
Accessing EDGAR Data, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. How bulk and automated access to EDGAR is meant to work, including declaring who you are.
17 CFR 229.601 (Regulation S-K, Item 601): Exhibits, Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School. Lists the exhibit requirements, including the subsidiaries-of-the-registrant exhibit that EDGAR users search for corporate-family mapping.
Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) Code List, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The four-digit SIC codes EDGAR still assigns to every registrant, with the office that reviews each.
EDGAR company and filing search, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The public search interface. Free, rate-limited, and authoritative for anything a registrant had to disclose.

These links identify research contexts to investigate, rather than conclusions about sector attractiveness. Ask how SEC EDGAR would be used on your list or return to the complete source directory.

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