How We Compare

Honestly, no, and it is not trying to. A Terminal is built for real-time trading, news, and execution. Beat Index replaces the part of that workflow where you dig into a company's fundamentals from its filings.

If your work depends on real-time market data, a chat network with the whole Street, and order execution, keep your Terminal. Beat Index is not a substitute for any of that. What it can replace is the slow, manual work of pulling a 10-K, finding the right figures, computing the ratios, and trying to compare them across companies. We do that part directly from the filings and present it cleanly, for a tiny fraction of the cost. Many of our users pair the two: the Terminal for the market, Beat Index for the fundamentals.

No. Beat Index gives you the data and the context to make your own decisions; it does not tell you what to buy or sell. Every figure is sourced from filings so you can judge for yourself.

We are a research and analysis tool, not an advisor. You will not find buy or sell ratings, price targets, or hot-stock lists here. What you will find is the company's own reported numbers, the methodology behind every metric, and plain-language explanations of what each one signals, so the judgment stays with you. That is deliberate: the goal is to make you a better reader of the numbers, not to outsource the thinking.

Koyfin and stockanalysis.com are clean, capable tools, and both are worth using. The difference is sourcing: they present vendor-aggregated data, while Beat Index reads each figure straight from the SEC filing and shows the trail.

stockanalysis.com is great for a fast, tidy overview, and Koyfin offers strong charting and macro coverage on a freemium plan. We are not here to tell you to stop using them. Where Beat Index earns its place is traceability and depth: every metric links back to the tag in the filing it came from, and we apply sector-aware adjustments (so a bank, an oil major, and a software company are each measured the way their accounting actually works) instead of forcing one template across all of them.

Bloomberg is the institutional standard for real-time prices, news, and trading, at a price built for trading desks. Beat Index focuses on one slice of that, fundamental analysis straight from SEC filings, and makes it affordable for individual investors.

A Bloomberg Terminal does hundreds of things and costs roughly $25,000 a year per seat. Most of that is real-time market data, messaging, and execution that a long-term investor never touches. Beat Index is not trying to replace it. We take the fundamentals (the balance sheet, the cash flow, the ratios that tell you whether a business is healthy) and pull them directly from each company's SEC filings, then show our work. If your question is "what do the numbers actually say about this company," that is the question we are built to answer, without a five-figure subscription.

Yahoo Finance shows you a vendor's summary of a company's financials. Beat Index shows you the company's actual SEC filing, with every number traceable back to the exact tag it came from.

Yahoo is excellent for a quick price check, and it is free. But its fundamental data passes through a third party that cleans, restates, and occasionally mislabels the figures, and when a number looks off there is usually no way to see where it came from. Beat Index parses the 10-K and 10-Q directly from EDGAR, so the free cash flow you see is the free cash flow the company reported, and you can trace it to the source. We also compute the deeper ratios (returns on capital, cash conversion, leverage) that a summary page leaves out.

Related: Free Cash Flow

You can create an account and start analyzing companies for free. Signing up takes a minute and does not require a credit card.

Getting started costs nothing: make a free account and you can pull up a company, read its filing-sourced metrics, and explore the charts. Our focus right now is making the analysis genuinely useful. If and when we introduce paid plans for power features, we will be clear about exactly what is free and what is not, with no surprises on your card.

A screener filters companies by a vendor's pre-computed numbers. Beat Index lets you see where each number came from, how it was calculated, and what it means, then compare companies on a like-for-like basis.

Most free screeners are filtering engines sitting on top of vendor data. They are useful for narrowing a list, but they cannot show you the filing behind a metric, the formula we used, or the period it covers. Beat Index does. You get the source tag, the calculation, sector-aware ratios, and plain-language context on what a figure signals, so you are deciding from the filing rather than from a headline number you have to take on faith.

Anyone who wants to judge a company from its actual financials: self-directed investors, students of the market, and analysts who want the filing without a Bloomberg bill. If you have ever wanted to read the numbers instead of the headline, it is for you.

Beat Index is built for the investor who is not satisfied with a summary. You do not need an accounting degree, because we explain what each metric means in plain language, and you do not need an institutional budget. Beginners use it to learn what the numbers signal; experienced investors use it to check a thesis against the source filing and compare companies on a consistent basis. If your only goal is a real-time options chain or live news, a trading platform will serve you better, and we will happily say so.

Almost always because we are reading the company's filing directly while Yahoo is showing a vendor's adjusted version. When they disagree, ours is the one you can trace to the source.

Differences usually come from three things: a vendor restating a figure, a different choice about which line items roll into a total (for example, what counts as cash, or how operating cash flow is defined), or a timing lag around a new filing. Because Beat Index ties every number to the exact tag in the 10-K or 10-Q, you can see precisely how we arrived at ours. That does not make every vendor number wrong, but it does mean you never have to guess where our figure came from.

Because the filing is the audited, primary source. A data vendor is a copy of a copy, and every copy is a chance for an error to slip in unnoticed.

Every public company files structured XBRL data alongside its 10-K and 10-Q. It is audited, tagged to the GAAP taxonomy, and free to anyone. When a vendor re-keys or normalizes that data, they can introduce restatements and labeling choices you never see. We treat the filing as our single source of truth, so there is no black box between what the company reported and what you read. When we cannot compute something because the company did not file it, we tell you that too, instead of quietly filling the gap with an estimate.

Related: XBRL, EDGAR

You can, and it is a great way to learn. But pulling the right figures from each 10-K, updating them every quarter, and translating them into sector-appropriate ratios by hand is slow work that Beat Index handles automatically, with every source shown.

A well-built personal spreadsheet is a real asset, and we would never tell you to stop building one. The friction starts when you have to fetch a figure: find the right filing on EDGAR, locate the correct line, decide which accounting tag it maps to, and then repeat that across a dozen companies every quarter. Beat Index does that part automatically, straight from the XBRL data the company filed, and it applies sector-aware adjustments so you are not comparing a bank's gross margin to a software company's using the same formula. The numbers come with their source tag and the formula used, so your spreadsheet and ours should agree, and when they do not you have a clear starting point to find out why.

EDGAR is the primary source and it is free. We actively encourage reading the actual filing. Beat Index just parses the XBRL data inside it into clean, charted, comparable metrics so you spend less time hunting through footnotes and more time on the analysis.

A 10-K for a large company can run to two hundred pages. The core financial statements are maybe ten of those, but even they require knowing which line items to combine, how a bank's revenue differs from a retailer's, and what changed between quarters. Beat Index reads the same structured XBRL data that EDGAR publishes, extracts every relevant figure, and presents it in a consistent layout across every company, with the source tag shown so you can go straight back to the filing to verify it. Think of us as a structured index into the filing, not a replacement for it. If you want the management commentary, the risk factors, or the full footnote disclosure, the filing is one click away and always will be.