A public company has four business days to tell the SEC about a material event. It does so on Form 8-K, and every 8-K lists the items it reports from a fixed catalogue: 1.05 for a cybersecurity incident, 4.02 when earlier financial statements can no longer be relied on, 4.01 for an auditor change, 5.02 for a director or officer change, and so on.
Palanor reads every 8-K filed by an S&P 500 company since September 2023 and lists the events by those item codes. The kind of event is never guessed. It is the item the company named.
Where you see it
- Recent events. On a company page in Discourse, below Congressional trading. It lists the company's notable 8-K events from the last twelve months, newest first, each with a link to the filing.
- The corporate events ledger. The public page at palanor.com/corporate-events lists recent events across the S&P 500. Use the filters at the top to show one kind: cyber incidents, restatements, auditor changes, director and officer changes, completed M&A.
- The API and MCP. /v1/events and the palanor_corporate_events tool return the same rows, with the accession number and filing link on each.
- The signal. events.exec_departures.sp500 counts, each month, the 8-K filings in which an S&P 500 company reports an executive officer leaving.
What counts as notable
Material agreements, terminations, bankruptcy, cybersecurity incidents, completed acquisitions and sales, debt accelerations, restructuring costs, impairments, delisting notices, auditor changes, restatements, changes in control, director and officer changes, and shareholder votes. Earnings releases, Regulation FD disclosures and "other events" are stored but not shown by default. Item 9.01 is a list of exhibits, not an event.
People on leadership changes
For Item 5.02, Palanor names the people who left or joined and their titles, read from the filing's own sentences with fixed patterns. No language model is involved. A person is listed only when one sentence names them, says what happened and gives the title. When a filing does not say it that plainly, the event still appears, without names. Sentences that repeat an earlier filing are skipped, so a departure is not counted twice.
Leaving covers resignations, retirements, terminations, not standing for re-election, and deaths. Joining covers appointments, elections and promotions.
What it does not say
An 8-K says what happened, not why. A planned retirement and an abrupt exit look the same in the item code. Amendments (8-K/A) are left out of the lists and counts. Coverage is current S&P 500 members.
Source
U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, EDGAR. Public domain. New filings are read every two hours from EDGAR's daily index.