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Task walkthrough · 2026

Pull a Company's 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K Filings — No Code

Two ways in: by the company you already know, or by a phrase you want hunted across every filing since 2001. Here's the whole task, start to export.

Open the SEC EDGAR Actor →

The goal of this page is narrow and concrete: end up with a spreadsheet (or JSON feed) of specific SEC filings — an annual report, a set of quarterlies, every material-event filing a company logged this year. EDGAR is free and keyless, but the path forks immediately depending on what you actually have in hand. Get that fork right and the rest is five minutes.

First, pick your entry point

Everything downstream depends on one question, so answer it before you touch anything:

You know the company. You want Tesla's last three 10-Qs, or Apple's most recent 10-K. Supply a ticker or CIK. EDGAR keys company data by CIK (Central Index Key), the SEC's permanent ID for a filer — a ticker can change, the CIK never does. The Actor maps the ticker for you, so TSLA is enough.

You don't know the company yet. You want every filing that mentions "going concern" or "material weakness" last quarter, no matter who filed it. Supply a search phrase instead. This runs against EDGAR full-text search, which indexes the words inside filings rather than the filer.

Mixing these up is the classic time-sink: people try to phrase-search for a company they already know, or they paste a ticker into a text-search box and get nothing. Decide the entry point first.

Filter to the form types that carry signal

EDGAR has hundreds of form types and most are noise for a given task — cover pages, exhibits, ownership amendments. Restrict the run to the handful you care about so you aren't paginating through clutter:

FormWhat it isPull it when you want…
10-KAnnual reportFull-year financials, the risk-factors section, MD&A narrative.
10-QQuarterly reportTo trend revenue or margin quarter over quarter between annuals.
8-KMaterial eventReal-time signals: acquisitions, exec departures, guidance cuts, bankruptcy.
DEF 14AProxy statementExecutive comp, board makeup, shareholder-vote items.
S-1IPO registrationA company about to go public, with its first audited financials.

The 8-K is the one people underuse. Because it's filed within days of a material event, a feed of 8-Ks for a watchlist is effectively a real-time news wire that beats most press coverage.

Bound it with a date window

Add a start and end date to every run. Two reasons: it keeps the result set small enough to scan, and full-text search has a hard floor — the searchable corpus only goes back to 2001. Phrase-searching for something from the 1990s returns an empty set and people assume the tool is broken. It isn't; the text index simply doesn't reach that far. Company-keyed pulls (by CIK) can go further back, but the words-inside search cannot.

Run it and export

Configure the run from the dashboard — ticker or phrase, form types, date window — and hit Start. No code is required for that first run. When you want it on a schedule or wired into something, the same configuration is one HTTP call. Here's the company-known path, pulling a year of 8-Ks:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_ACTOR_ID/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "tickers": ["TSLA"],
    "formTypes": ["8-K"],
    "startDate": "2026-01-01",
    "endDate": "2026-06-30",
    "maxItems": 100
  }'

And the phrase-hunting path, finding every recent 10-K that mentions a specific risk:

curl -X POST "https://api.apify.com/v2/acts/YOUR_ACTOR_ID/run-sync-get-dataset-items?token=YOUR_APIFY_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "searchQuery": "\"material weakness\"",
    "formTypes": ["10-K"],
    "startDate": "2026-01-01",
    "endDate": "2026-06-30",
    "maxItems": 200
  }'

Each result row carries the company name and CIK, the form type, the filing date, the accession number and a direct link to the document on EDGAR's Archives. Append &format=csv to the dataset URL and you get a spreadsheet instead of JSON — drop it straight into Excel or Google Sheets.

One gotcha worth knowing. If you ever hit EDGAR directly instead of through the Actor, the SEC's fair-access rule asks for a descriptive User-Agent (a name and email) and a cap of roughly 10 requests per second. There's no API key to throttle, so the SEC enforces it bluntly: exceed the rate with a generic User-Agent and your whole IP gets temporarily blocked from sec.gov. The Actor sets a compliant header and paces the requests for you, which is most of why "no code" here also means "no surprise ban."

Skip the fork-in-the-road plumbing

The SEC EDGAR Actor handles ticker-to-CIK mapping, the company-vs-phrase split, form filtering, the 2001 full-text floor and the fair-access throttle — and hands you filings as one tidy JSON or CSV feed.

Run the SEC EDGAR Actor → Or get done-for-you leads

Putting the whole task together

  1. Answer the fork

    Known company → ticker or CIK. Unknown company, known topic → search phrase.

  2. Name the forms

    10-K for the annual story, 10-Q to trend quarters, 8-K for live events, S-1 for pre-IPO.

  3. Set the window

    Add start/end dates; remember phrase search bottoms out at 2001.

  4. Run and pull

    Dashboard for one-offs, one HTTP call for automation, &format=csv for a spreadsheet.

Related no-code data guides

Get stock data without an API key EDGAR: the two systems explained Yahoo Finance API Company Enrichment API Give an AI agent live web search

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