How to use EDGAR for Prospect Research
Sample CRFNET Communication
To: cfrnet@listserv.oit.unc.edu
From: cfrnet@listserv.oit.unc.edu on Fri, Jan 24, 1997 12:03 PM
Subject: Finding Information on Board Members

Question : What is the best way to finding information on people who sit on a particular board? Answer: To discover information on a public company's board of directors via the WWW:

  1. Fire up Netscape or whatever web browser you have and point it at. . . http://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/srch-edgar . . .the SEC's EDGAR database (Electronic Data Gathering, Analysis, and Retrieval). As of May 1996, all publicly traded companies are required to file electronically with the SEC.

  2. Enter the company name. It will return a list of companies and their filings. The information you are looking for is in the Definitive Proxy statement. . . .it is called the DEF14 on EDGAR. Inside, it will list the people standing for election to the board for the following year. These are 99.9% of the time the people who will be on the board as they are the only proposed candidates, almost always, and if not, say in the case of a Proxy fight as part of a hostile takeover attempt, it will be big news. It will include a brief bio of each, list their board membership compensation and usually their stock holdings in the company.

  3. Repeat the process for the other company boards the person sits on (they will be listed in the bio paragraph), to see some extent of their stock holdings. If their occupation is an executive position at a company, then the Proxy statement will also list, further down, executive compensation including salary, stock and stock options.

Information supplied by:
Gregory Shearer,
Corporate Researcher,
Carnegie Mellon University
gs3y@andrew.cmu.edu

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