All companies which have shareholders are required to file registration statements, periodic reports, and other forms to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) through a system known as EDGAR. By tracking reports to this system, you can have an insider's view of newsworthy updates to corporate progress, financial status, and governance.

Here's a brief tour of EDGAR, with examples from several locally traded companies.

Searching for companies

Start your search from the EDGAR company search page. You'll need to have either the name of the company, its ticker symbol as traded on a stock exchange, or a unique "CIK" code which acts as a file number for all related transactions for that company.

Sample searches with results for local companies include Domino's Pizza (DPZ), Borders Group (BGP), and Aastrom Biosciences.

Searching for insider transactions

On each company page, you'll see a record which shows "insider transactions." If an individual has a substantial holding in a company, and if they make sales or purchases in shares of that company, they may be required to file a report showing that they made that sale and disclosing their current holdings.

A search for ownership reports for Domino's Pizza returns a list of transactions which have been recently reported. Dig a little deeper, and you get an SEC "Form 4", which details the individual transaction.

Our sample is a December 22, 2010 transaction by David Brandon, in his role as a holder of securities in Domino's Pizza. The report is of a gift of 38,238 shares of Domino's Pizza, Inc. common stock by David A. Brandon to the Regents of the University of Michigan. At the listed valuation of $16.07 per share, that transaction had a value of $614,484.66.

Searching for individual holdings

The EDGAR database also gives you a window into the holdings of individuals who are currently or formerly directors of public companies. Some examples:

David Brandon, University of Michigan athletic director; showing holdings in Domino's Pizza, Burger King Holdings, DTE Energy, TJX Companies, Kaydon Corp and Northwest Airlines, as director.

Mary Sue Coleman, University of Michigan president, showing holdings in Johnson and Johnson and in Meredith Corporation.

Daily updates

In addition to retrospective searching, it's straightforward to get a list of most recent SEC filings on a web page or as an RSS feed. The feed can be filtered to a single company, or you can look at the whole stream.

If today is a typical day, then there's no way for one human being to read through each of these reports in detail; this morning's feed showed 40 separate filings in the span of 10 minutes.

Making sense of it all

The SEC guide, Researching Public Companies Through EDGAR, gives more details on the variety of forms and required filings which are available through this system. In almost every case, there is some level of complexity which an experienced reader of these filings will find that is not evident on first reading.

Edward Vielmetti reads government documents for AnnArbor.com. Email him at EdwardVielmetti@annarbor.com.