The filings and events that move a stock you own — 8-K, 10-Q, earnings & more

When a stock you own jumps or drops and you go looking for why, the real answer is usually in one of a handful of documents and scheduled events. Most are public, free, and — once you know what you're looking at — surprisingly readable. Here's the field guide.

(As always: this is education, not advice. It's how these documents work, so you can read them yourself. Nothing here is a recommendation or a prediction.)

The 8-K — "something material just happened"

An 8-K is the filing a company makes when something material happens between its regular quarterly reports — and it's often the fastest official signal you'll get. Companies file them for things like:

• an acquisition or a major deal,
• a CEO or CFO departure,
• earnings results (the press release is usually attached),
• a big customer win or loss,
• a lawsuit, a restructuring, or bankruptcy,
• a change in auditors (sometimes a quiet red flag).

The tell: an 8-K exists because the company decided this was material enough to disclose immediately. That's a strong hint it's worth your attention — before it becomes a headline. The filing itself sits on the SEC's free EDGAR database, in the company's own words.

How people misread it: assuming every 8-K is dramatic. Plenty are routine (a scheduled dividend, a shareholder-vote result). The skill is telling "this changes the story" from "this is admin."

The 10-Q — the quarterly detail

The 10-Q is the company's quarterly financial report: revenue, profit, cash, debt, and — often the most valuable part — the "Management's Discussion" section, where the company explains its own results in prose.

Where an 8-K says something happened, the 10-Q says here's how the business is actually doing. It's where slow stories live: a margin quietly shrinking, debt creeping up, a segment stalling. None of that shows up on a single day's price — it accumulates across quarters. (Reading three or four 10-Qs in a row tells you more than any one of them.)

(Its bigger annual sibling is the 10-K — same idea, once a year, more thorough.)

Earnings — the number vs. the expectation

Four times a year, earnings land — and this is where one of the biggest misunderstandings in investing lives.

A company can report record profit and the stock can fall. Not because the results were bad, but because the market already expected them to be that good and had priced it in. Stocks move on surprise — results versus expectations — far more than on the raw numbers. "Beat" and "miss" are always relative to a bar that was set beforehand.

So the useful question on an earnings day isn't "were the numbers good?" It's "were they better or worse than what everyone already assumed?"

Guidance — what the company says about tomorrow

Alongside results, companies often give guidance: their own outlook for the next quarter or year. Guidance frequently moves the stock more than the actual results, because markets look forward. A great quarter with weak guidance can sink a stock; a mediocre quarter with raised guidance can lift it.

(Note exactly what guidance is: the company's own stated outlook — a fact about what management said, not a prediction you or I are making. That distinction matters.)

Analyst actions — the expectation, moving

Between earnings, Wall Street analysts publish upgrades, downgrades, and revised price targets. These move stocks partly on substance and partly on signal — a wave of analysts revising the same direction shifts the consensus expectation the next earnings will be judged against.

Worth knowing: analysts often lag — reacting to news you may have already seen in an 8-K. An upgrade isn't a verdict; it's one more data point about where expectations are heading.

Putting it together

None of these is a magic tell, and none says what you should do — that's not what they're for. Read together, they answer a narrower, more useful question: what actually happened to this company, in its own words and on the record?

Insider filings are a closely related thread — see what insider buying and selling actually signals — and the full picture is in what actually moves a stock you own.

This filing stack is also exactly what Pip reads every morning for the stocks you own — 8-Ks, 10-Qs, earnings, guidance, analyst shifts — handed back in plain English with the source attached, so you don't have to camp on EDGAR to stay current. How it reads all that without inventing things is its own story.

If you'd rather not find out about the 8-K three days late, Pip is opening to a small first group →.