Where Form 8854 Valuation 2023-2024

Hi, my name is I sweat the mother and today's topic is a pretty boring one. I want to talk about how to get information from financial disclosure forms. Evaluation doesn't sound exciting, but if you think about it, almost all of our raw information comes from annual reports (10k) or 10-qs and whatever the appropriate filing is for your company. Let's start with the basic premise. Over the last 20 or 30 years, information requirements on companies have increased, whether it's the SEC or the equivalent authority in your particular country that covers companies or annual reports. If you look at what is revealed to investors right now, it's a lot more than it used to be 15, 20, 25 years ago. That's a good thing, right? It is, but there is a dark side to it. As companies reveal more and more information, what's increasingly happening to annual reports and 10-ks is they're becoming data dumps. What I mean by data dumps is companies essentially put everything they can think of into those disclosures, partly because they don't want to get sued, they don't want to be focused on later as not revealing enough information. And that's bad news for us because we have to separate the wheat from the chaff, we have to separate what's information from what's distraction. So one of the things I want to talk about today is how do you go through a 10-k or a 10-Q or an annual report and figure out what's important and what's not because I think the key to doing valuation today is not that you don't have enough information, but separating out the information that matters from the information that doesn't. So let's get the process rolling. When you open up an annual report or 10-K,...