Methodology

All compensation and governance data comes from official filings on SEC EDGAR. We do not scrape news articles, press releases, or third-party databases.

Filing types we ingest

• DEF 14A (Proxy Statements) — The primary source for U.S. company executive compensation: the Summary Compensation Table, Pay versus Performance disclosure, CEO Pay Ratio, director compensation, equity grants, and governance narratives (clawbacks, insider trading policies, equity timing).
• Form 20-F — Annual reports for Foreign Private Issuers (companies like WIX or SAP that trade on U.S. exchanges but are incorporated abroad).
• Form 4 — Insider transaction reports, filed within two business days of any buy, sell, or exercise by officers and directors.
• Form 144 — Notices of proposed sale of restricted securities, giving early warning of planned insider sales.

Stock prices for Total Shareholder Return (TSR) calculations come from Yahoo Finance. Market capitalization is sourced from Yahoo Finance and cached for up to 24 hours.

We use a deterministic-first approach. Structured HTML tables in SEC filings follow predictable patterns that rule-based parsers handle reliably. AI is used only as a repair layer when deterministic extraction is incomplete.

Step 1: Filing download

Filings are fetched directly from EDGAR using CIK + accession number lookups. We respect the SEC’s 10-request-per-second rate limit and identify ourselves with a generic bot user agent.

Step 2: Deterministic parsing

Custom parsers extract structured data from HTML tables in proxy filings:

• Summary Compensation Table (SCT) — Salary, bonus, stock awards, option awards, non-equity incentive, pension changes, other compensation, and total for each named executive officer.
• Pay vs Performance (PVP) — Compensation Actually Paid, peer group TSR, company TSR, and net income across multiple fiscal years.
• Director Compensation — Fees, stock awards, and totals for each board member.
• Equity Grants — Individual grant details including award type, share count, and grant-date fair value.
• Pay Ratio — CEO-to-median-employee compensation ratio.
• Insider Activity — Form 4 and 144 transactions are fully deterministic (no AI needed).

Step 3: AI repair (when needed)

When deterministic parsers fail to extract a table — typically due to unusual formatting, merged cells, or non-standard iXBRL markup — we fall back to an LLM. The AI receives the raw HTML and is asked to extract the same structured fields. Its output goes through the same validation pipeline as deterministic results.

Step 4: Validation

Every extraction — whether deterministic or AI-assisted — passes through post-ingestion checks:

• Executive name validation (rejects numeric artifacts, requires name-like patterns)
• Compensation total cross-checks (sum of components must approximate the reported total)
• Director compensation sanity checks (non-null totals, valid names)
• Duplicate detection (same executive appearing under variant names)

Our pay-for-performance verdicts (Aligned, Misaligned, Mixed Signals) analyze the relationship between executive compensation and shareholder returns.

Inputs

• Compensation Actually Paid (CAP) vs TSR: Year-over-year changes in realized pay compared to stock performance. Pay should generally track performance.
• Pay Ratio: CEO-to-median-worker ratio provides context on pay magnitude relative to the workforce.
• Grant Timing: We flag equity awards that appear suspiciously timed relative to material news.
• Governance Safeguards: Clawback policies, insider trading restrictions, and stock ownership guidelines.

Severity levels

• Healthy: Pay moves in the same direction as stock and proportionally tracks performance.
• Concerning: Pay outpaces stock returns by 1.5–2.5×, or shows minor misalignment.
• Red Flag: Pay increases while stock declines, or pay outpaces stock by more than 2.5×.
• Egregious: Severe misalignment during major stock declines.

Data freshness varies by filing type:

• Proxy statements (DEF 14A / 20-F): Ingested within days of filing. Most companies file between March and June (“proxy season”). We currently cover 500+ companies, with coverage expanding throughout the year.
• Insider transactions (Form 4 / 144): Refreshed daily via automated pipeline. SEC requires Form 4 filings within two business days of a transaction.
• Market data (stock prices, market cap): Refreshed from Yahoo Finance with a 1-hour cache for market cap and real-time for TSR calculations.
• AI verdicts: Regenerated when underlying data changes. Cached with time-based expiration (6–24 hours depending on endpoint).

We believe in stating our limitations before anyone else does:

• Not investment advice. This site provides educational information about executive compensation. It is not financial, legal, or investment advice.
• Grant-date fair value, not cash. Stock award values in the Summary Compensation Table reflect the estimated value on the grant date, not what the executive actually received. We show Compensation Actually Paid (CAP) to help bridge this gap, but it is still an estimate.
• Coverage is not exhaustive. We currently cover 500+ of the largest U.S. public companies. Smaller companies, SPACs, and recently-IPO’d companies may not yet be in our dataset.
• AI can make mistakes. Approximately 20% of our extractions use AI repair. While outputs are validated, automated analysis may contain errors. Always verify important information against the original filing on EDGAR .
• Lag in data. Compensation data is annual and disclosed 3–5 months after fiscal year end. There is always a gap between the period being reported and when the filing appears.
• Context matters. Pay-for-performance alignment is complex. Our verdicts are simplified summaries that highlight directional signals but cannot capture every relevant factor (e.g., retention needs, turnaround situations, industry norms).

For full legal terms, see our Terms of Service. For definitions of compensation terms, see the Glossary.