How a brief is built

The filing comes first. A model writes the prose, and a check holds every figure in it to the filing before you read it.

Every figure starts in the filing

A brief is one company and one quarter. Underline locates that quarter's 10-Q, or the 10-K that closes it, on SEC EDGAR. Revenue, margins, earnings per share, cash and free cash flow come from the XBRL data filed with it, each labelled with the period it covers. Guidance comes only from the earnings release the company filed on an 8-K; if there is none, the brief says "Not provided".

Some sections are measured, not written

Key financials, fundamentals, peer standing, insider activity, risk language, what changed since the last filing, 8-K red flags, the company's other SEC filings, said vs. did, the analyst snapshot and the market read are computed from source data. No model writes them.

What the model writes

The signal, segment notes, key risks, management signals, the forward outlook and the scorecard are written by a Claude model from Anthropic. It may not invent a number or a name, and news headlines are never written by the model.

The check every brief passes

Every money figure must be stated in the source or follow from two source numbers. Segment names must appear in the filing. Guidance is blocked when no earnings release was found. A brief that fails is written again once; anything that still fails is removed. The check stops invention; it does not make the analysis correct.

How the grade works

Five lines are graded out of 100: revenue quality, margin trajectory, the balance sheet, management credibility and forward visibility. The total maps to a letter from A+ to F that describes the quarter. Some lines are capped by arithmetic, such as inventory growing much faster than revenue. A grade is never recomputed, and it is not a recommendation.

A brief describes what a company reported and grades the quarter. It is not investment advice, and the grade is a read on the quarter rather than a price target.

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