The Claude Financial Analyst

What This Guide Is

The Claude Financial Analyst is a research workflow for fundamentals-focused retail investors: the 20-minute 10-K extraction sequence, the 8-minute quarterly 10-Q pass, earnings-transcript forensics (guidance language, dodge lists, the metric management stopped mentioning), the six-pack red-flag hunt through footnotes and dilution, side-by-side company comparisons, and a Project-per-holding system where your research compounds — with your thesis and sell conditions written down before emotions get a vote.

The bright line runs through every chapter: Claude accelerates the reading layer. Valuation, position sizing, and the decision itself stay human — and this guide never tells you what to buy or sell.

What's Inside

The Foundations

• The honest capability map: what Claude is genuinely excellent at and what it must never be used for
• The free-data setup: SEC EDGAR, IR pages, and the context-window reality for 300-page documents
• Why the real edge is simply reading what other shareholders never open

The Workflows

• The 10-K in 20 minutes: business-in-English, the numbers table, deduplicated risks, the MD&A decoder, and the always-run skeptic pass
• The 10-Q quick-pass and 8-K triage — including the filing-vs-earnings-call cross-check
• Transcript forensics: the Q&A dodge list, guidance-language classification, the quarter-over-quarter diff
• The comparison engine: two 10-Ks head-to-head on metrics, strategy, and risk asymmetry
• Red-flag hunting: dilution drift, footnote sweeps, related parties, debt fine print, auditor changes, receivables divergence

The System

• One Project per holding: filings as knowledge, your thesis + sell conditions as instructions, the quarterly "what changed" ritual
• The two-hour weekly routine: screen one, deep-dive one, maintain holdings, rotate a re-underwrite
• 20 analyst prompts covering the full workflow — proxy decoder, segment autopsy, thesis stress-test, pre-earnings brief
• Verification discipline: tracing every number, extraction vs interpretation, and the decision journal that turns outcomes into education

Who This Is For

This guide is for stock-pickers who want to actually understand what they own — and whose due diligence deserves better than headlines and a chart.