Methodology · sources · disclaimers

How this site is made

The documents

Every filing on this site comes from SEC EDGAR, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission's public filing system. S-1 registration statements are public domain. For each company we archive the original S-1, track its amendments, and — where the company priced — the final prospectus (Form 424B4) that records the actual offering price. Every quote on this site links back to the original document on sec.gov, using text fragments so your browser scrolls straight to the passage.

The analysis

The extraction and retrospective commentary are produced editorially with the help of a large language model (Claude), in two strictly separated passes:

• Extraction reads only the S-1 itself — no hindsight allowed — and pulls out the pitch, the substantive risk factors with verbatim quotes, and what a careful reader would have noticed at the time. Quotes are programmatically verified to be verbatim excerpts of the filing; the rare quote that fails verification links to the whole document instead of a highlighted passage.
• Retrospective then judges those claims against verified outcome data: market prices (Yahoo Finance), acquisition and bankruptcy records, and widely documented public events. Verdicts are instructed to be conservative — "unclear" is an allowed and common answer.

Price data: IPO prices come from the final prospectus; post-IPO prices are monthly closing prices. Companies that were delisted (acquired, taken private, or withdrawn before ever trading) carry manually verified outcome records instead of market data.

What to trust, and how much

The quotes are the ground truth — they are the company's own words, and you can click through to check every one. The verdicts and narratives are editorial judgment, produced by AI and reviewed at the pipeline level, not by a human reading every line. Treat them as a well-sourced starting point, not a definitive record. If you find an error, the primary source is one click away — trust it over us.

What this is not

Not investment advice. Not affiliated with the SEC or any company shown. Company logos identify their owners and belong to them. The archive currently covers 21 notable filings and grows from there.