Research to Riches, Part 5

Companies themselves.

The “Companies Themselves” section of Chapter 6 in The Neatest Little Guide to Stock Market Investing opens as follows:

Before investing in any company, some people insist on seeing an investor packet from headquarters. In there, you’ll find an annual report containing a happy look at the company’s future and financial statements that may not be as happy, a recent 10-K and a recent 10-Q, press releases, analyst reports, and general information.

For many small companies that interest you, the company investment packet will form the bulk of your research. The whole idea of discovering small companies is, well, discovering them. If Value Line and everybody else already knows about them, they’ve been discovered.

Back in the day, we requested investor packets from the Investor Relations Department of any public company of interest. They generally included:

• The annual report

• The 10-K and 10-Q

• Analyst reports

• Recent press releases

• Any free product samples

While the free samples were a long shot—especially if you were investing in Ford or Boeing—the rest was pretty standard. A week to ten days later, your very own investor packet would arrive free of charge. What a joy, capitalism!

These days, it’s more common to visit the Investor Relations section of a company’s website. In this update, let’s focus on that approach, which still provides access to all the pertinent information, but in a more immediate digital form.

Nvidia

On the website of superstar AI chipmaker Nvidia (NVDA $132 +140% Last 12 Months), you access Investor Relations from the footer:

Nvidia’s market capitalization (outstanding shares of stock multiplied by their per-share price) is $3.2T. That’s enormous. In fact, it’s the second-biggest company on the market by this measure, behind only Apple, which weighs in at $3.5T.

On Nvidia’s Investors page, you’ll learn that the company invented the graphics processing unit (GPU) in 1999.

In so doing, it “redefined modern computer graphics and revolutionized parallel computing. More recently, GPU deep learning ignited modern AI—the next era of computing—with the GPU acting as the brain of computers, robots, and self-driving cars that can perceive and understand the world.”

The page goes on to provide a corporate profile, quarterly results via a press release, webcast, and other media. The financial report dashboard looks like this:

Clicking on the 2025 Q3 Form 10-Q/Form 10-K bubble takes you to a PDF of the documents. Let’s look at Nvidia’s 10-Q, which is a quarterly report mandated by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission to be filed by publicly traded companies. In it, we find Nvidia’s most recent accounting documents, including its unaudited income statement. It begins as follows:

Except for per-share data, figures are in millions, so we’ll add 000,000 to each number. In the nine months ended in October 2023, revenue was $38,819,000,000, which we’ll shorthand to $38.819B. That number is a good starting point to grasp all the recent excitement around Nvidia. Why is it the belle of the megatech ball?

Because from $38.819B over the nine months ended in October 2023, it grew revenue 135% to $91.166B in the nine months ended in October 2024. Not a bad year, we could say—and the investing collective did say—which might have had something to do with NVDA shares rising 140% over the last 12 months.

Investor Relations pages are chock full of this kind of raw data, much of it easier on the eyes. For example, Nvidia’s fiscal Q3 2025 PowerPoint presentation covering the same time frame as the income statement excerpted above presents information in charts and tables, like this:

Dave Inc.

Let’s shimmy down to the opposite end of the market capitalization spectrum, where we’ll find an outfit called Dave Inc. (DAVE $82 +740% Last 12 Months). With a market cap of $1B, it’s 3,200 times smaller than Nvidia.

Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Los Angeles, Dave offers financial products and services, including:

• Budget: a tool that helps manage income and expenses,

• ExtraCash: a short-term liquidity alternative that can advance funds to a member’s account through the automated clearing house network and avoid a fee,

• Side Hustle: a job application portal to find supplemental or temporary work,

• Surveys: a way to earn extra money by taking paid surveys, and

• Dave Banking: a digital checking and demand deposit account.

On Dave’s website, you’ll find a familiar link in a familiar place: the footer. It looks like this:

On the Investor Relations page, you’ll find just what you expect: Dave’s news releases, latest earnings results, and a chance to sign up for DAVE investor email alerts.

Here’s what Dave offers regarding Q3 2024:

The company’s 10-Q shows a story quite different from Nvidia’s. For starters, figures are in thousands (000), not millions, but they do show Team Dave leaping ahead:

From $185,974,000 in the nine months ended in September 2023, Dave grew revenue 32% to $246,236,000 in the nine months ended in September 2024.

It looks like Dave’s business strategy is working. From the company’s Q3 2024 earnings presentation:

The CAC stands for Customer Acquisition Cost—basically the price tag for getting someone to join the club.

Dave aims to keep this cost low by first tackling people’s immediate financial needs (liquidity), which creates a strong initial value proposition. Think of it like handing someone an umbrella during a rainstorm. It generates goodwill and they’ll remember you. After addressing a person’s pressing need for money, Dave works to build a deeper relationship by offering additional banking services. The goal is to maximize Lifetime Value (LTV) while keeping acquisition costs in check.

Speaking of LTV, the phrase LTV/CAC refers to the ratio of a customer’s lifetime value (the total revenue they bring in over time) to the cost of acquiring them.

For example, if Dave spends $10 to get a new customer (the CAC) and that customer generates $100 in revenue (the LTV), the LTV/CAC ratio is 10 to 1—pretty good deal. The bigger this number, the better Dave is at turning marketing dollars into profit.

The “short payback periods” part means Dave recoups the money spent acquiring customers quickly, to keep growing without running out of cash.

Convenient and Free

Whether you’re researching a giant conglomerate or a small startup, all the investing information you need is just sitting there on company websites, waiting to be explored. It’s easy to access, completely free, and comes with a bonus: beyond uncovering the investing potential of different stocks, you’ll pick up some valuable business insights along the way.

Coming in Part 6: Stock Screeners.