FlashSEC Review – Should You Use This Research Tool?

About FlashSEC

FlashSEC is an easy-to-use platform that enables you to pull up critical data from companies’ SEC filings. It’s especially useful for small-cap and penny stock investors who want to quickly investigate companies’ outstanding share offerings.

FlashSEC is convenient, but there isn’t a lot to this platform. In addition, all of the data is available in the SEC’s EDGAR database for free for investors who know how to find it there.

In our FlashSEC review, we’ll explore what this tool can do and help you decide whether it’s worthwhile.

FlashSEC Pricing Options

FlashSEC costs $49.99 per month or $499 per year. You must sign up for an annual subscription to access FlashSEC’s API. You can try out the platform free for 7 days (credit card required).

FlashSEC Features

FlashSEC is a simple platform that collects data from SEC filings and transforms it into a more accessible format. The platform offers data for more than 7,800 companies, including penny stocks, small-cap stocks, and mega-cap stocks. All data is taken from the SEC’s EDGAR database and is updated in nearly real-time as new filings appear online.

When you search for a company in FlashSEC, you’ll see a simple report with a few components:

A description of the company

Information about the company’s share structure

Financial data from the company’s latest 10-Q filing

Details about outstanding warrants and shelf registrations

A summary of major events from recent 8-K filings

Share structure information includes a company’s market cap, shares float, shares authorized, the percentage of shares held by insiders and institutions, and shares sold short. Financial data includes a company’s cash on hand, assets, liabilities, and cash runway.

Information about warrants and shelf registrations may be particularly useful for investors. Shelf registration data includes a link to the original registration, its initiation and expiration dates, and the starting and remaining offering values. If there were any takedowns from these registrations, FlashSEC also lists them.

If companies have major news that they are required to report in an 8-K filing, FlashSEC provides a summary of each 8-K filing along with the date of the report.

Lastly, FlashSEC includes a simple chart showing the change in a company’s shares float, shares outstanding, and authorized shares over time.

You can create a watchlist with up to 20 ticker symbols and pull up reports for all of the companies in your watchlist with a single click. FlashSEC simply lists the reports one on top of another on the page, so you just have to scroll down to see data for each company.

You can also sign up to receive email alerts when a company on your watchlist has a new SEC filing.

FlashSEC Platform Differentiators

FlashSEC is extremely simple and easy to use. You can quickly look up share structure information about any SEC-registered company and get alerts when a company you’re interested in has a new filing.

The simplicity of this platform is a major advantage for investors who just want a more user-friendly version of the SEC’s EDGAR database. However, there isn’t much else to FlashSEC. There isn’t a list of companies with new filings, and there are no tools for researching more deeply into a company’s financial performance. You also can’t view financial data from any 10-Q forms except a company’s most recent filing.

What Type of Investor is FlashSEC Best For?

FlashSEC will be most helpful for penny stock and small-cap investors who want to keep track of important financial data contained in SEC filings. Investors can look at data from 10-Q forms to get an update on how a company is performing financially and at data about shelf registrations to understand whether they are at risk of having their shares diluted through a new offering.

Large-cap investors can also use FlashSEC to more easily access data from SEC filings. However, since there is more financial news coverage of large-cap companies, this data is often already available in other formats.

Alternatives to FlashSEC

The most direct alternative to FlashSEC is the SEC’s EDGAR database. This is an electronic database where you can find all of a company’s SEC filings, and it’s where all of the data in FlashSEC comes from. Navigating the EDGAR database and finding the information you want isn’t nearly as simple as using FlashSEC, but it’s also completely free.

Another alternative to FlashSEC is Dilution Tracker. Dilution Tracker offers data about shelf registrations and financial performance similar to FlashSEC, but it goes one step further by helping investors understand how likely a company is to offer new shares to raise money – and dilute existing shares in the process. Dilution Tracker is slightly more expensive than FlashSEC at $60 per month or $468 per year, but it offers quite a few additional features for advanced investors.