RiskDelta — What Changed in the Risk Factors

What this does
RiskDelta compares the Risk Factors section — Item 1A — across a company’s two most recent SEC filings and reports what changed.
Why this section
Risk factors are the one part of a filing where a company describes its own exposure in its own words, under legal obligation, every single year. When something genuinely changes, the wording changes with it.
The changes are quiet:
• “may be unable” becomes “have been unable.” A hypothetical became a fact.
• A risk factor appears that carries a term the company had to disclose — material weakness, going concern, covenant, investigation.
• A risk factor disappears. Companies rarely delete risk language voluntarily.
None of this shows up in a table. It has to be read, in both versions, side by side.
Exactly what it does
• Resolves the ticker through the SEC’s public ticker-to-CIK map
• Pulls the filing history from the SEC submissions API
• Fetches both documents and isolates Item 1A, handling the fact that a 10-K names the section twice — once in the contents, once at the section itself
• Splits each section into individual risk blocks
• Matches blocks between years by word-level similarity, so a rewritten risk is recognised as the same risk rather than counted as one deletion plus one addition
• Flags hedge-to-certainty shifts and newly appearing materiality terms
No API key and no subscription. These are the SEC’s own public endpoints.
What you get
1. Filing snapshot — the two filings compared, and how the section’s total length moved
2. The headline — the single most consequential change, and why it outranks the rest
3. New risks — each with a quote, materiality terms flagged
4. Removed risks — each with a quote from the older filing
5. Language hardened — before-and-after quote pairs where hedging gave way to certainty
6. What the company is signalling — readings grounded in the changes above
7. Watch list — three things to check in the next filing
8. Limits of this reading — what this comparison can and cannot support
Scope and limits
• Compares the two most recent filings of one form type. Not a multi-year history.
• Item 1A is one section. Material changes also live in MD&A, footnotes and 8-Ks, and this does not read those.
• Some filers incorporate risk factors by reference, or restructure the section wholesale. The report says when that happened rather than presenting inflated counts as change.
• Matching is similarity-based. A heavily rewritten risk can still appear as one removal plus one addition, and the report flags that pattern.
• US filers on SEC EDGAR only.
• 10-Q sections are often short by design, carrying only updates to the annual risk factors.
What this does not do
• No investment advice. No price targets, no valuation, no buy, sell or hold, no view on whether a change is good or bad for the stock. It reports what the company disclosed and how the wording moved.
• It does not track insider transactions, institutional holdings, or congressional trades.
• It does not summarise entire filings or extract financial statements.
• It does not forecast anything.
• It does not assert why a risk was removed. Filings rarely say, so likely readings are offered and marked as inference.