Glossary

The vocabulary of SEC filings, in plain English

Reading a 10-Q for the first time feels like learning a dialect. Here’s a cheat sheet for the terms you’ll see most often on Drift Brief and on EDGAR itself.

10-K: Annual filing. Big document; the company's most detailed reporting of the year. Includes audited financial statements, Risk Factors, MD&A, business description, and more.
10-Q: Quarterly filing. Lighter than the 10-K (unaudited), but still required for the first three quarters of each fiscal year. The fourth quarter is folded into the 10-K.
8-K: Material-event filing. Filed within four business days when something specific and important happens — an acquisition, an executive departure, a bankruptcy, a new agreement. Item numbers (Item 5.02 etc.) categorize the event.
MD&AManagement's Discussion and Analysis: Section of a 10-K or 10-Q where management explains the financial results in narrative form. Often the most informative section for a non-accountant — written for SEC compliance but readable.
Risk Factors: Item 1A of the 10-K (and updates in the 10-Q). A list of risks the company believes shareholders should know about. Drift watches this section closely — when a risk is added, removed, or rewritten, that's a disclosure signal.
Accession: The unique ID SEC assigns to each filing — e.g. 0000320193-26-000010. Looks like a phone number. Drift uses it to link directly to the source filing on EDGAR.
EDGAR: SEC's Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval system. Free, public, and the source of every Drift finding. Every citation pill on a finding deep-links to EDGAR.
fpFiscal Period: The reporting period of a filing. 'FY' means the annual 10-K; 'Q1', 'Q2', 'Q3' are the three quarterly 10-Qs. Drift uses these labels in citation breadcrumbs.
fyFiscal Year: The fiscal year a filing belongs to — often the calendar year, but companies can choose any 12-month period (Apple's fiscal year ends in late September, for example).
Drift: Drift Brief's name for material change in a company's disclosure language across consecutive filings. New language in Risk Factors, a rewritten MD&A paragraph, a new line item — all are drifts worth noticing.
Materiality: SEC-defined threshold for whether something is significant enough to require disclosure. Drift's editorial severity labels (critical / warn / info / positive) describe disclosure significance — they are observations, not investment ratings.
Going concern: Auditor or management language indicating substantial doubt about a company's ability to continue operating for the next 12 months. A critical signal when it appears for the first time in a filing.
Restatement: When a company refiles previously-reported financial statements to correct an error. A material restatement is almost always a critical-severity disclosure.
XBRLeXtensible Business Reporting Language: Tagged-data format SEC requires alongside filings. Lets machines (and Drift) extract specific sections like Risk Factors or Commitments & Contingencies cleanly across thousands of filings.
My Companies: Your set of tickers Drift is paying attention to for you (the section is named "My Companies" in the app). Each tier has a cap (free 3, pro 100, insider unlimited). Findings on the companies you follow populate your dashboard and Friday digest.
Severity: Drift's four-level scale for disclosure significance: critical (materially new or rewritten), warn (significant rewrite, no clear directional valence), info (a noticeable change), positive (a previously-disclosed risk removed). Never an investment rating.
Friday digest: Weekly email summarizing the most material drift across your companies. The product's retention anchor; weekly cadence is deliberate, not real-time.
Publisher's exemption: Section 202(a)(11)(D) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940 (Lowe v. SEC, 1985). The legal basis on which Drift operates as a publication rather than a registered adviser — same as Substack newsletters and financial media. See our methodology and compliance pages.