You don't need a Bloomberg terminal: free tools for finding a company's numbers

A Bloomberg terminal costs around $30,000 a year, well out of reach for almost every individual investor. Most people reading this don't have a research team, a trading desk, or an unlimited data budget, they have some spare time, some spare cash, and, most importantly, a willingness to learn. The good news: you don't need any of that expensive infrastructure to do real fundamental research. The exact numbers used throughout this series, revenue, margins, EPS, shares outstanding, net debt, free cash flow, are all sitting in free, public sources. This article is a tour of where to actually find them.

One thing worth saying upfront: nothing below is sponsored, and we don't get paid to recommend any of it.

The primary source: SEC EDGAR

Every company listed on a U.S. exchange is legally required to file its financial statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and every one of those filings is public and free to read on EDGAR, the SEC's own filing database. This is the ground truth. Every other tool in this article, aggregators, screeners, even a company's own investor relations page, is ultimately just repackaging what already exists here.

Two filings matter most. The 10-K is a company's full annual report, containing the full income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow statement, plus a much longer discussion of the business, its risks, and how management is thinking about it. The 10-Q is the same company's quarterly filing, covering just that quarter's numbers in less detail, filed three times a year between annual reports. Search a company's ticker or name on EDGAR and both are sitting there, going back years.

Let's take Microsoft's FY2024 10-K as an example, the same company this series has used throughout.

Here's Microsoft's actual FY2024 10-K filing on EDGAR: Microsoft FY2024 10-K. Open it, and you can find the exact revenue, EPS, and balance sheet figures used elsewhere in this series, sourced straight from the filing itself rather than a summary of it.

Reading a raw 10-K takes patience and practice, the language is legal and the formatting is plain. That's the tradeoff for using the primary source: nothing is smoothed over or reinterpreted, so it's the one place you can always go to check whether a number quoted somewhere else, in this series or anywhere else, is actually right.

A company's investor relations page

Most public companies also run their own investor relations page, built for investors rather than regulators, so it's usually easier to navigate than EDGAR. This is where you'll find earnings releases, investor presentation slides, webcasts of earnings calls, and often the same 10-K and 10-Q filings, just linked from a friendlier page.

Microsoft's is here: Microsoft Investor Relations. It's a good habit to bookmark the investor relations page of any company you follow closely, it's usually the fastest place to see a fresh earnings report the day it's released.

Why this matters for what you've already learned

Every number this series has used, revenue and margins, ratios, and per-share metrics come from exactly the documents above. Knowing how to find a number yourself, and check it against the primary source, is what turns "the article said" into "I confirmed it."

Sites that do the math for you

Reading a raw 10-K every time you want to check a ratio isn't realistic for everyday research. This is where free aggregator sites earn their keep: they pull the same numbers straight from filings and calculate the ratios, margins, and multi-year trends for you.

There isn't one right choice here, several free options cover this well, and it's worth trying more than one to see which layout you like working with.

• stockanalysis.com — clean, fast, free financial statements and ratios going back several years.
• macrotrends.net — the fastest way to see a single line item charted over ten or more years, revenue, margins, net income, all one click away.
• TIKR — a free tier covering U.S. companies with several years of history, plus a full screener.
• roic.ai — free financial statements and ratios with a strong focus on returns on capital.

Rounding out the toolkit

A few more free tools worth knowing about, each useful for something a little different than the fundamental-data sources above.

• Finviz — best known as a stock screener, filtering thousands of companies by valuation, sector, or performance, but it's also useful for seeing the market as a whole through its heat maps. That broader, market-wide view, reading sentiment and sector rotation rather than a single company's numbers, is its own skill, one we'll cover in a future article and link back to this tool then.
• Yahoo Finance and Google Finance — free, familiar, and fast for a quick price check, basic financials, and recent news on any ticker.
• TradingView — the standard for free charting, and like Finviz, also useful for zooming out to indices and broader market behavior.
• Simply Wall St — turns a company's fundamentals into simple visual summaries, a genuinely different, more visual way to get oriented on a company quickly. The free plan caps how many companies you can view each month, but it costs nothing to start.

The habit worth keeping

None of these tools replace the primary source, they save you the time of reading it every single time. The strongest habit to build is the one this series has quietly been demonstrating all along: use a free aggregator for speed, but know how to walk back to EDGAR or a company's own filings when a number matters enough to double check. A Bloomberg terminal earns its price for the professionals who need its speed and breadth every day, but for the fundamental research this series teaches, the free toolkit above genuinely covers it.