A 10-K is the annual report every US public company files with the Securities and Exchange Commission, audited by an independent accounting firm and covering the full fiscal year. A 10-Q is the unaudited quarterly filing that sits between successive 10-Ks, covering the three months just ended. Apple Inc. files one 10-K and three 10-Qs in each fiscal year, and the figures below come from its most recent filings, covering the trailing twelve months through its fiscal 2026 third quarter.
How to read a 10-K and a 10-Q
A 10-K opens with Item 1, the Business section, describing what the company sells and how it organises its segments, followed by Item 1A, Risk Factors, where management sets out the risks it considers material, roughly in the order it ranks them. Item 7 carries the Management's Discussion and Analysis (MD&A), the narrative explanation of what happened in the year and why. Item 8 holds the audited financial statements themselves, together with the footnotes that carry segment detail, debt schedules and contingencies the headline numbers leave out. An independent auditor's report sits alongside those statements, stating whether they present the company's financial position fairly in all material respects.
A 10-Q is shorter and faster. Part I carries condensed, unaudited financial statements and an abbreviated MD&A; Part II covers legal proceedings, updates to risk factors only where something material has actually changed since the last 10-K, and any unregistered sales of securities. The 10-Q's statements are reviewed under professional accounting standards rather than fully audited, so they follow the same accounting rules as the 10-K without the audit opinion attached.
An 8-K sits between the two. Companies file one whenever a specific triggering event occurs, such as a leadership change, a material agreement, or the release of quarterly results ahead of the fuller 10-Q. It carries no financial statements of its own, usually just the announcement and any accompanying press release, and is the fastest-moving of the three filing types.
Some readers treat the 10-Q as the more useful filing precisely because it arrives more often than the 10-K. Others treat the 10-K as the only reliable baseline, on the grounds that it is fully audited while the 10-Q's reviewed-only numbers can still be revised before the next annual filing closes the books. Both views have merit: frequency on one side, audit assurance on the other.
SEC filings explained: what to read first and why
In a 10-K, the Business section provides context before the numbers mean anything. Risk Factors come next, because they frame what could go wrong before reading what did. The MD&A is where management explains, in its own words, why revenue, margin or cash flow moved the way they did over the year, which is why it is worth reading before the statements themselves. Only after that does it make sense to open Item 8's audited financial statements, followed by the notes for anything the statements alone do not explain.
A 10-Q rewards a different order. Because risk factors rarely change from one quarter to the next, the fastest route to what is new is Part I's MD&A, followed directly by the condensed financial statements. The notes are shorter than a 10-K's, so there is less detail to work through outside segment and subsequent-event disclosures.
A worked case: Apple's 10-K and 10-Q filings
Apple's most recent 10-Q, filed 2026-07-31, reports a trailing-twelve-month revenue of $466.8 billion, up 14.2% year over year. That growth rate accelerated by 1.5pp versus the prior quarter's trailing-twelve-month figure, a trend visible only by comparing consecutive 10-Qs rather than reading any single one in isolation.
Gross margin over the same period reached 48.7%, within an operating margin of 33.2%, up 1.3 percentage points year over year, and a net margin of 27.6%. On the cash flow side, operating cash flow totalled $146.7 billion, up 35.1% year over year, against capital expenditure of $10.0 billion, down 18.9%. The difference, free cash flow of $136.7 billion, up 42.1% year over year, produced a free cash flow margin of 29.3%, up 5.7 percentage points year over year, a level sitting at the 86.76 percentile of Apple's own history.
Net income over the period reached $128.9 billion, up 29.9% year over year, while the diluted share count fell 2.1%. Apple paid $15.6 billion in dividends and spent $82.2 billion on share repurchases over the same twelve months; dividends alone equalled 12.1% of net income and 11.4% of free cash flow. None of these figures sit in any single filing by themselves; they come from combining four discrete quarters drawn from the 10-K and the three 10-Qs that preceded it.
| Metric | TTM value | YoY change |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | $466.8bn | up 14.2% |
| Gross margin | 48.7% | — |
| Operating margin | 33.2% | up 1.3pp |
| Net margin | 27.6% | — |
| Operating cash flow | $146.7bn | up 35.1% |
| Capital expenditure | $10.0bn | down 18.9% |
| Free cash flow | $136.7bn | up 42.1% |
| FCF margin | 29.3% | up 5.7pp |
Common mistakes and limits
The most common mistake is comparing a 10-Q's numbers to a 10-K's without checking which period each column covers: a 10-Q's income statement typically shows both the latest quarter and the year-to-date, while the 10-K covers a full fiscal year, so lining up the wrong columns distorts any trend. A second mistake is skipping straight to the financial statements and ignoring the notes. The trailing-twelve-month figures above are not single reported numbers; they are built by combining four discrete quarters, several of which require differencing one cumulative year-to-date filing against the next, a method that depends on each quarter's underlying data being internally consistent. A third mistake is reading an 8-K as though it carries full financial statements. It generally does not; the detail follows later, in the 10-Q or 10-K covering the same period. Both filing types are also subject to restatement, so anyone building a multi-period view should use the most recently filed value for a given period rather than the first version released.
Where to see it on Fundamentalytics
Fundamentalytics lists the specific SEC forms behind every figure in this piece, including Apple's 10-K filed 2025-10-31 and its 10-Q filed 2026-07-31, on its filings page, together with each accession number. The page at /data-sources/ sets out how trailing-twelve-month figures such as those above are built from the underlying quarterly filings, including where a figure is derived by differencing cumulative periods rather than taken directly from a single filing.
What it means for value
The growth and margin figures that 10-Ks and 10-Qs disclose feed directly into a discounted cash flow model. Fundamentalytics' base case for Apple uses a stage-one growth assumption of 14.2%, matching the trailing-twelve-month revenue growth rate disclosed in the most recent 10-Q. Lowering that growth assumption by 5pp changes the model's value per share by −24.4%; raising it by 5pp changes it by +31.5%. A 1pp lower free cash flow margin changes the model's value by −3.4%, while the 5.7pp rise in free cash flow margin actually recorded over the past year, if it persisted, would change the model's value by +24.5%. Raising the discount rate by 1pp changes the model's value by −15.6%. These are model values under stated assumptions, not a comparison with the share price.
