Glossary: filing, accounting and valuation terms

28 terms, each defined as EvidInvest uses it and with the source of the number named. Where a term has more than one common definition — free cash flow has three — this page says which one is on the page you were reading. Last checked 2026-09-10.

Filings and provenance

Accession number: The SEC’s unique identifier for one filing, written as 0000320193-25-000079. Every US statement row on EvidInvest from fiscal 2009 onward carries the accession number of the filing the figure first appeared in, so a restatement adds a row rather than overwriting history. See it in use.
XBRL: The tagged, machine-readable format US registrants have filed their financial statements in since 2009. It is why filing-linked rows on this site begin at fiscal 2009: before that there is no tagged source to link a figure to.
10-K, 10-Q, 8-K: The annual report, the quarterly report and the current report a US registrant files with the SEC. Filing search on this site returns the passage as filed together with its form, period of report, accession number and sec.gov URL. See it in use.
20-F, 40-F: The annual reports filed with the SEC by foreign private issuers (40-F for eligible Canadian issuers). A company that files one of these is an SEC filer and its rows are filing-linked like any other.
Form 13F: The quarterly holdings report filed by institutional investment managers over $100 million. EvidInvest publishes 13F institutional ownership on the website; it is not one of the MCP tools. See it in use.
EvidInvest’s standardized statements: Financial statements mapped by EvidInvest onto one common line-item layout so companies can be compared and so a series runs unbroken across decades. For US listings from fiscal 2009 the underlying figures come from the company’s own SEC filing and the row links to it. For the 40,000+ listings outside the US on 60+ exchanges, and for US rows before 2009, the row is a standardized statement with no SEC filing behind it, and the page says so rather than implying one exists.
Period of report: The fiscal period a filing covers, as distinct from the date it was filed. Both are printed on statement rows, because a figure disclosed in a later filing about an earlier period is a restatement, not new news.

Statement and growth terms

Free cash flow (FCF): Cash from operating activities minus capital expenditure, both as filed. EvidInvest uses this definition everywhere; it does not subtract acquisitions, add back stock compensation, or use an "owner earnings" variant. See it in use.
TTM (trailing twelve months): The most recent four reported quarters summed, rather than the last fiscal year. Where a metric on this site is TTM it is labelled TTM, and the quarters it sums are the filed ones, so a company that has not yet reported shows a shorter window rather than an estimate.
CAGR: Compound annual growth rate: the constant yearly rate that takes the first value to the last over the period. Growth rates on this site are filed CAGRs over 1, 3, 5, 10 and 15 years, computed from the standardized statements, not from analyst estimates. See it in use.
Diluted shares: The weighted-average share count including the effect of options, restricted stock and convertible securities, as filed. Per-share figures on this site use the diluted count unless the row says otherwise.
Net debt: Total debt minus cash, equivalents and marketable securities. A company with more cash than debt has negative net debt, which this site prints as net cash rather than as a negative number without explanation.
Enterprise value (EV): Market capitalisation plus net debt: what it would cost to buy the whole business including its obligations. EV is the numerator in EV/EBITDA and EV/FCF.
Segment revenue: Revenue split by product line or operating segment as the company itself reports it in its filings. Segments are the company’s own definitions and change when the company redefines them; EvidInvest does not re-cut them.

Valuation terms

DCF (discounted cash flow): A valuation that projects future free cash flow, discounts each year back at a required return, and adds a terminal value. Choose the growth and you read off a value per share. See it in use.
Reverse DCF: The same model run backwards: fix the share price, hold every other input, and solve for the growth rate that makes the model produce exactly that price. The output is an assumption the price embeds, not a valuation and not a recommendation. See it in use.
WACC (discount rate): The weighted average cost of capital, used as the rate future cash flows are discounted at. It is a judgment, not a filed figure, which is why every implied growth number on this site is printed with the discount rate it was solved at.
Terminal growth: The rate cash flows are assumed to grow at forever, after the explicit projection ends. It has to be below the discount rate for the model to converge, and small changes to it move the answer a lot.
Implied assumptions: What today’s price already assumes about the future, expressed as a number you can compare with what the company has filed. This site shows implied assumptions instead of issuing a verdict on whether a price is right. See it in use.
Fair value range: The span of values produced by running several methods on the same filed inputs, shown with each method’s inputs rather than collapsed into one number. A range is the honest output of a set of models that disagree.
Margin of safety: The gap between an estimated value and the price paid, expressed as a percentage. It is a function of the estimate, so it inherits every assumption behind it.
PEG ratio: The price/earnings ratio divided by an earnings growth rate. On this site the growth rate is a filed CAGR and the EPS basis is stated on every row, because a P/E series that silently switches between GAAP and adjusted EPS is not a series. See it in use.

Access and pricing terms

MCP (Model Context Protocol): The open protocol an AI assistant uses to call external tools. EvidInvest runs a remote MCP server over Streamable HTTP, so Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor and other clients connect to a URL with nothing installed locally. See it in use.
Streamable HTTP: The MCP transport a remote server speaks over ordinary HTTP. It is what lets an MCP server be a URL rather than a process the user has to run.
Credit: The prepaid unit EvidInvest sells. One balance per account is spent by the website, the REST API and the MCP server alike; credits never expire and there is no subscription. Free to start, from $10. See it in use.
Delayed price: A price published at least fifteen minutes after the trade, as distinct from real time. US prices on this site are Cboe delayed data and every price-bearing response names the source and the delay. There is no real-time feed and no tick data.
Options positioning: Put/call ratios, call and put walls, at-the-money implied volatility and the IV term structure, computed from the previous trading session only. Nothing from the session in progress is served on any surface, at any delay. See it in use.
Thesis monitor: An investment thesis written as pillars and re-checked against each new filing as it arrives, returning a verdict per pillar with the passage behind it. See it in use.

Where the numbers come from

US statement rows from fiscal 2009 come from the company's own XBRL filing on SEC EDGAR and carry the form, period and accession number of that filing. Earlier US rows and every listing outside the US are EvidInvest's standardized statements: there is no SEC filing behind them and the page says so rather than implying one exists. Prices are Cboe data delayed at least fifteen minutes. This is research and data software, not investment advice.

Machine-readable version of this page: /learn/glossary.md. Full site index for language models: /llms.txt.