There is a wealth of free information available about Canadian companies, all it takes is a little time and persistence to find exactly what you want.
For publicly listed companies, a quick search on the relevant Stock Exchange site will provide you with basic information about a company. For example, the majority of Canadian companies are listed on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX) and the TSX Listed Company Directory provides basic information about all the companies on the exchange, including a brief description, contact details, website address and standard industry classifications.
There are many investing websites that will provide company information, including Google Finance, the Globe & Mail’s Globe Investor site, Yahoo Finance, MSN-Money, and BusinessWeek (which also provides the ability to search for private companies), to name a few of the more popular sites.
More in depth information about Canadian public companies can be found on SEDAR, which is the official repository of public documents required by Canadian securities regulators for all publicly traded listed companies and mutual funds. When you first enter SEDAR there are two main areas that you will want to examine, the first is the Company Profiles section, which provides similar information to the TSX profile and the Search Database page, which enables a search of all of a company’s filings. You can also access an individual company’s documents by pressing the button on the bottom of the relevant profile page.
Many Canadian companies are also listed in the USA, so are required to file public documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which are accessible through the EDGAR database. In many cases the documents filed to Canadian and US regulators will be identical, but due to differences in regulatory requirements, some additional information may be found in the US filings.
In upcoming posts, I will detail how to make sense of what you find on SEDAR and EDGAR, and also provide a few tips on how to find the most useful documents.
