A fifteen minute routine for sizing up a stock

Fifteen minutes is not enough time to value a company. It is enough time to decide whether a company deserves more of your time, and that is a different question with a much faster answer.

The routine below is built around that distinction. You are not reaching a verdict. You are looking for the two or three things that would make you stop, plus the handful of disclosures and dates that show what other people have already done with their own money.

Set a timer. The time box matters because it forces you to open the highest value documents first instead of scrolling until something feels interesting.

Minutes one to three: what it sells and who pays for it

Start with the plainest question available. Where does the money come from? Most annual reports answer it in the first few pages. In a 10-K, the business description sits in Item 1 and the risk factors sit in Item 1A. Read the opening pages of Item 1 and the first five or six risk factors, then stop.

You are after two things. The first is the revenue model in a single sentence, including who signs the cheque and how often. The second is customer concentration, because a company naming one or two customers as a material share of revenue has a very different shape to one selling thousands of small accounts.

If you cannot state the revenue model in a sentence by minute three, that is useful in itself. A business you cannot summarise is one you cannot monitor, and monitoring is most of what holding a position involves.

Minutes three to seven: the filings that earn the time

The filing calendar tells you how fresh the numbers in front of you are. The SEC sets periodic report deadlines by filer size. Large accelerated filers have 60 days after their financial year ends to file the 10-K, accelerated filers have 75 days, and everyone else has 90. For the quarterly 10-Q, large accelerated and accelerated filers have 40 days after quarter end, and non accelerated filers have 45.

The 8-K is the report people skip and probably should not. It is the current report a company files when a specified event occurs, and the SEC's instructions require it within four business days of the event unless a particular item states otherwise. Executive departures, material agreements, auditor changes and earnings releases usually appear here before anywhere else, so the recent 8-K list is the quickest picture of what has actually happened lately.

The SEC's full text search covers more than twenty years of EDGAR filings, so checking whether a phrase such as a customer name has appeared before takes well under a minute.

Minutes seven to ten: who has already acted

Company insiders report their transactions on Form 4, and the SEC requires it within two business days following the transaction date. That short window is why Form 4 data is worth checking early: it is close to the event rather than months behind it.

Read sales carefully. Since the SEC's 2022 amendments, Forms 4 and 5 carry a checkbox showing that a reported transaction was intended to satisfy the Rule 10b5-1 affirmative defence conditions, along with the plan adoption date. Those trades were set in motion in advance, and the SEC requires a cooling off period before trading can begin: for directors and officers, the later of 90 days after adoption or two business days after results are disclosed in certain periodic reports, capped at 120 days, and 30 days for other people. A sale arranged three months earlier says far less about current thinking than an open market purchase, which is the distinction behind what insider buying actually means.

Congressional disclosure runs on a slower clock. Under the STOCK Act, members file a periodic transaction report for each purchase, sale or exchange of stocks, bonds, commodity futures or other securities above US$1,000, due by the earlier of 30 days from being made aware of the transaction or 45 days from the transaction date. Mutual funds, exchange traded funds and Thrift Savings Plan holdings sit outside that requirement. The filings are free to read on the House Clerk's disclosure site and the Senate's public disclosure system, and the mechanics are covered in tracking politician stock trades.

Institutional holdings are slower again. Managers with investment discretion over US$100 million or more in section 13(f) securities file Form 13F within 45 days of the end of the calendar quarter, so a 13F is already at least six weeks old when you see it. Useful for context, useless for timing.

Minutes ten to twelve: options and volume behaviour

Compare a stock's volume to its own recent range rather than to another company's. A million shares means nothing in isolation and a great deal if the name normally trades a tenth of that.

On the options side, the question is not whether contracts traded but whether the activity is concentrated: whether it clusters in one expiry or strike, whether the trades opened or closed positions, and whether size went through on the bid or the offer. Those details separate a pattern from noise, which is the point of understanding unusual options activity rather than reading a volume figure alone.

The last three minutes: the calendar, then your exit conditions

Most unpleasant surprises are scheduled. Note the next earnings date, any lockup expiry, any shareholder meeting, the outer bound for the next 10-Q implied by the filer deadlines above, and anything the company itself has flagged such as a product event or a regulatory decision date.

A position taken two days before results is a different decision to the same position taken the day after, even when the analysis is identical. Two minutes on the calendar is what stops that being an accident.

Then finish by writing two or three specific, observable conditions that would make you drop the idea. Not "if the story changes", but something checkable: the customer named in the risk factors goes elsewhere, gross margin falls two quarters running, the founder files a Form 4 sale that is not under a plan. Write them before you have any exposure, because conditions written afterwards tend to move.

How InsiderPulse handles this

InsiderPulse is built to compress the middle part of this routine. It pulls SEC Form 4 filings, congressional trade disclosures, options activity, dark pool and volume data, prices and news into a single view per asset, and scores every asset it covers from 0 to 100 from those inputs. The score is a summary of what the data currently shows, not a prediction, and how the score is built is documented so you can see which inputs moved it. Ask Pulsey answers questions about a specific name with citations, which is usually faster than opening five sources yourself. It covers US listed stocks and ETFs plus crypto, forex and commodities, and not ASX shares.

InsiderPulse is a data tool. Nothing on this page is financial advice.