SEC EDGAR is Broken. Here's What to Use Instead.
15-minute delays, no alerts, terrible search. Why EDGAR frustrates investors and the free tools that actually work.
I spend a lot of time on SEC filings. More than most people would consider healthy.
Every public company in America is required to tell you what it's doing. Earnings reports, insider trades, executive departures, acquisitions, bankruptcies. It all flows through one pipe: the SEC's EDGAR system. The database is complete, public, and free. In theory, it's the great equalizer between Wall Street and everyone else.
In practice, using EDGAR feels like browsing the internet through a fax machine.
This isn't abstract complaining. I built Earnings Feed specifically because EDGAR drove me crazy. After years of fighting with the interface, I decided to just build something better on top of it. This is why.
EDGAR's Origin Story
To understand EDGAR's quirks, it helps to know when it was born.
In the mid-1980s, the SEC started experimenting with electronic filing. Before that, if you wanted a company's 10-K, you either physically went to an SEC reading room or paid a vendor to mail you paper copies. By 1996, electronic filing was basically mandatory.
At the time, this was a big deal. It dragged corporate disclosure out of filing cabinets and into something resembling the modern world. For what it was replacing (paper and microfiche) EDGAR was an enormous upgrade.
Then the rest of the internet sprinted ahead.
Search engines got smarter. Interfaces became cleaner. Phones turned into pocket computers. We got auto-complete, relevance ranking, notifications, and UX patterns built around real users. EDGAR got a few coats of paint and some new endpoints. The core experience never fundamentally changed.
Why EDGAR Is So Painful
If you've spent any time on EDGAR, you already know it "feels bad." Let me be specific about why.
Search That Doesn't Really Search
Type "Tesla 10-K" or "Apple earnings" into the search box. Look at what comes back.
You'll get a wall of results, often unsorted by relevance, with amended forms mixed in, exhibits listed alongside main filings, and no obvious sense of which link is "the" document everyone cares about. Misspell something and the system shrugs. Ask a question like "Amazon latest 10-Q" and it has no idea what you're trying to do.
Under the hood, EDGAR still thinks in terms of exact terms and form codes, not intent. If you already know you want "AAPL 10-K filed on 2024-10-27," you can bully the interface into giving it to you. If you're even slightly fuzzier, things get messy fast.
Eight Clicks to Get One Filing
The navigation is stuck in another era.
A typical path: go to sec.gov, find the "Company Filings" link, search by name or ticker, pick the right entity from a list of lookalikes, land on a list of every filing they've ever made, filter or scroll to the form type you care about, click through to the filing page, finally select the actual document inside that filing.
You don't feel the pain for one filing. You definitely feel it when you're looking up six companies in a row, or checking back every few days around earnings. It's busywork.
Mobile Is Unusable
On paper, EDGAR is mobile "compatible." The site will load on your phone.
That's where the story ends.
Text is tiny. Tables spill off the edge of the screen. Links are so close together that tapping the right one feels like surgery. Some files only render properly after you download them and open them in a separate app. Trying to skim a 10-Q on your phone turns into pinching, zooming, and scrolling sideways.
Most investors check markets from their phones. EDGAR is effectively saying: come back when you're at a desk.
No Alerts
Companies file important documents all the time. A material 8-K might drop a minute after market close. Insider buying on Form 4 can hit late at night or on weekends. EDGAR has no concept of "alerts."
If you want to know when your portfolio company files something, EDGAR expects you to either keep manually refreshing, or set up RSS feeds and wire them into your own tooling.
There's no built-in watchlist. No email digest. No push notifications. The data is real time. Your access to it is as real time as your willingness to hit refresh.
Raw Documents, No Help
Even once you've found the right filing, EDGAR throws the raw submission at you.
A 10-K comes as a bundle of HTML or text files, prefaced by metadata, followed by exhibits numbered in a way that makes sense to lawyers and nobody else. The main body often lacks a clickable table of contents. No highlighting of key sections. No summary. No cross-links to previous years for comparison.
There is nothing wrong with raw documents on their own. But "raw" doesn't have to mean "unhelpful."
Links Only a Database Could Love
Even the URLs fight you. A typical EDGAR link looks like:
https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=0000320193&type=10-K&dateb=&owner=include&count=40
You can't look at that and know what it is. It's hard to share. Sometimes links change when the SEC updates internal routing. None of this is catastrophic, but it all contributes to the feeling that this system was never meant to be user-friendly.
Who Gets Left Behind
This friction isn't just an aesthetic problem. It changes how information flows.
Individual investors who don't live in EDGAR all day tend to check filings less often than they would if it were pleasant. They miss things. An 8-K disclosing a major executive departure. A 10-K risk factor that quietly hints at trouble. A series of Form 4s showing insiders buying aggressively into weakness.
Professional investors don't miss those things. They either build tooling on top of EDGAR themselves or pay for commercial layers. They're not better because they know where sec.gov's "Company Filings" link is. They're better because they never have to touch it.
The data is technically public. Functionally, access is tiered.
Why the SEC Hasn't Fixed It
If EDGAR is clearly behind the times, why hasn't it been rebuilt?
The SEC's job is to police markets and enforce securities laws, not to design beautiful user interfaces. Its technology budget gets pulled toward enforcement tooling, surveillance systems, and internal infrastructure. Making filings "available to the public" satisfies the letter of the law.
There's also the reality of legacy systems. EDGAR was architected in a different era. Rebuilding it would mean running two systems in parallel for years, migrating enormous amounts of data, and preserving backward compatibility with countless scripts and workflows. That's expensive and full of political risk for an agency whose wins rarely make headlines but whose failures absolutely do.
Unlike private companies, the SEC doesn't lose revenue if its interface is clunky. There is no competitive pressure.
All of that is understandable. It doesn't make EDGAR any more fun to use.
Tools That Make EDGAR Usable
The gap between "what EDGAR provides" and "what investors actually need" is where an entire industry has appeared.
At the high end, you have platforms like AlphaSense, which combine EDGAR filings with broker research, transcripts, and AI-driven search. They sell to institutional desks for five-figure annual prices per seat.
BamSEC sits closer to the metal: they specialize in making SEC documents readable and searchable, and charge hundreds of dollars a year.
Then there's more focused products. OpenInsider takes EDGAR's Form 4 data and turns it into a specialized view of insider trading. Last10K pulls out financial statement data and lets you download it cleanly.
The common thread: they don't have any secret database. They read the same public feed you can. Then they do the work EDGAR doesn't: index it better, present it better, notify you when something changes.
Why I Built Earnings Feed
I started with a simple annoyance: if you care about SEC filings in real time, EDGAR makes you work way too hard. If you care about more than a handful of companies, it's even worse. You're spending time on navigation instead of reading and thinking.
So I decided to solve the basics that EDGAR ignores:
- Stream filings in real time, as soon as they hit EDGAR
- Group everything by company in a way that makes sense to humans, not databases
- Make it easy to follow a watchlist and see "what just happened" in seconds
- Design it so it works on a phone as well as a big monitor
That's why Earnings Feed gives you a live filings feed instead of a CGI query page. It's why each company has a profile where 10-Ks, 10-Qs, 8-Ks, and Form 4s live together in chronological order. It's why we built dedicated hubs for 10-K annual reports, 8-K current reports, and insider trading.
I'm not trying to replace high-end platforms that provide deep search across PDFs and call transcripts. I'm trying to fix the part that should never have been broken: getting to the filings you care about, fast, on any device, without paying a subscription.
Because the underlying data is already free, I think the basic experience should be free too.
If You're Stuck Using EDGAR Anyway
Sometimes you still have to go straight to the source. Maybe you're hunting for a very specific archived document. When that happens, a few small habits make it less awful.
Going directly to the company search URL instead of the front page saves clicks. Filtering by form type on the query string (type=10-K, type=8-K, type=4) trims down the noise. Bookmarking the "current filings" page lets you see everything filed today in one place.
If you know you'll be spending time inside a single document, downloading the HTML or PDF and reading it in a proper viewer is usually kinder to your eyes than EDGAR's built-in display.
None of this fixes the structural issues, but it blunts some of the sharp edges.
Where This Goes
EDGAR will remain the canonical source for SEC filings. That's not changing.
What is changing is how those filings are consumed. We're seeing more structured data (XBRL), more machine readability, and more tools that don't just display filings but interpret them. Highlighting changes from prior years. Extracting metrics. Generating summaries. AI will be layered on top in all sorts of ways, some helpful, some noisy.
The question is whether access to filings remains gated by bad UX and expensive intermediaries, or whether more of that power becomes available to anyone who cares enough to look.
I think the right answer is the second one. The SEC has already done the hard part: forcing companies to disclose and making the raw feed public. The least the rest of us can do is build interfaces that respect people's time.
Skip Wrestling with EDGAR
If you're tired of threading your way through EDGAR just to see that your company filed a new 8-K, you don't have to.
Create a free Earnings Feed account, add the tickers you care about to a watchlist, and let the filings come to you. The live feed shows what just hit EDGAR across the whole market. Company profiles give you a clean, mobile-friendly view of each name's filing history. The insider hub surfaces Form 4 activity without you ever typing "type=4" into a query string.
EDGAR will always be there. Earnings Feed makes it humane.