PennyTune

Tune out the noise.

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PennyTune is a free, open-source, no-API-key forensic due-diligence tool for US-listed micro-caps. Point it at the tickers you already hold or are watching and it surfaces the risk signals and forensic flags in each company's SEC filings - accounting-quality and distress scores, dilution and corporate-action risk, insider activity, 8-K material events, delisting-notice and active trading-suspension risk, and fails-to-deliver settlement context - computed from each company's public SEC filings, so you can assess the company yourself.

It runs entirely on public, no-account, no-API-key data: SEC EDGAR is the single data source (the listed-company universe, all filings, and the fails-to-deliver / trading-suspension feeds). There is no bring-your-own-key option anywhere.

PennyTune surfaces evidence for your own due diligence - it does not tell you whether a stock is "clean" or "a landmine", does not give buy/sell advice, and does not predict outcomes. It analyzes SEC-registered US-listed companies and fetches no live prices: it does not screen by current price, compute technical indicators, or assess tradeability (bid-ask spread/liquidity). You supply the ticker(s) to rank, and verify current price and tradeability yourself in a brokerage.

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⚠️ Disclaimer - please read carefully

DISCLAIMER — PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

1. NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PennyTune is a research and educational tool
only. Nothing it produces is investment advice, financial advice, legal
advice, tax advice, trading advice, or a recommendation, offer, or
solicitation to buy, sell, or hold any security or to make any financial
transaction. Rankings, scores, signals, and any other output are the
result of automated rules applied to public data and are provided for
informational and educational purposes only.

2. NO ADVISER RELATIONSHIP; NOT REGISTERED. The author is not a licensed
or registered financial advisor, investment adviser, broker, broker-
dealer, or investment professional, and is not registered with the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, or any state or other
securities regulator. Use of this software creates no advisory,
fiduciary, brokerage, agency, or professional relationship of any kind
between you and the author. The author is not acting as a fiduciary to
you.

3. NO RELIANCE. You agree not to rely on this software or its output as
the basis for any investment, trading, or financial decision. Any and
all decisions you make are made solely by you, in your own independent
judgment, and at your own risk. You are solely and exclusively
responsible for your own investment decisions and their consequences.

4. EXTREME RISK OF PENNY STOCKS. Penny stocks and low-priced, micro-cap,
and sub-$1 securities are highly speculative and carry a substantial
risk of loss, up to and including the TOTAL LOSS of your investment.
They are subject to low liquidity, extreme volatility, wide bid-ask
spreads, limited or unreliable public information, fraud, market
manipulation (including pump-and-dump schemes), dilution, reverse
splits, trading halts, suspensions, and delisting. You should not invest
any money you cannot afford to lose entirely.

5. NO GUARANTEE; FORWARD-LOOKING. Scores, rankings, and signals are NOT
predictions and do NOT guarantee any outcome or result. Past performance
is not indicative of, and does not guarantee, future results. No
representation is made that any account will or is likely to achieve
profits or losses similar to any analysis, backtest, or example shown.

6. THIRD-PARTY DATA "AS IS." All data is obtained from third-party and
public sources (including SEC EDGAR and other public sources)
and is provided "AS IS." Such data may be inaccurate,
incomplete, delayed, out of date, or wrong. The author does not create,
endorse, verify, or guarantee any third-party data and makes no
representation or warranty as to its accuracy, completeness, timeliness,
or fitness. You must independently verify all information against primary
sources (such as official SEC filings) before acting on it.

7. NO WARRANTY. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE
SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE,
ACCURACY, AND NONINFRINGEMENT. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE
SOFTWARE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, SECURE, OR THAT DEFECTS WILL
BE CORRECTED.

8. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE
LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR ANY CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY
DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, OR
INVESTMENT OR TRADING LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR ITS USE OR OUTPUT, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF ADVISED
OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. THIS LIMITATION APPLIES REGARDLESS OF
THE FAILURE OF ANY ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY.

9. INDEMNIFICATION. You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the
author and any contributors from and against any and all claims,
liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable
legal fees) arising out of or related to your use of the software, your
investment or trading decisions, or your violation of this disclaimer.

10. COMPLIANCE. You are responsible for complying with all laws,
regulations, and rules applicable to you, including securities laws and
the terms of service of any data provider. The software is intended for
lawful personal and educational use only.

11. SEVERABILITY. If any provision of this disclaimer is held to be
invalid or unenforceable, that provision shall be limited or eliminated
to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions shall
remain in full force and effect.

12. NOT AFFILIATED WITH OR ENDORSED BY ANY REGULATOR. PennyTune is not
sponsored by, endorsed by, approved by, reviewed by, or affiliated with
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FINRA, the operators
of EDGAR, or any other government agency, regulator, or securities
exchange. References to "SEC," "EDGAR," and "SEC filings" identify only
the public data sources used and do not imply any endorsement,
partnership, or official status. No regulator sponsors, endorses,
reviews, or verifies PennyTune or its output.

13. INDEPENDENT PERSONAL PROJECT. PennyTune is a personal, independent,
open-source project. It is not a professional, advisory, or regulated
service, and nothing in it or its output constitutes professional or
regulated financial advice.

14. ACCEPTANCE. By installing, accessing, or using PennyTune, you
acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to this entire
disclaimer, and that you use the software entirely at your own risk. If
you do not agree, do not install or use the software.

---

What it is

The US micro-cap segment is full of companies that look cheap for cause - cash-burning, diluting, near delisting, or structured for manipulation. The hard part of due diligence is reading the filings to find those landmines. PennyTune does that reading for you: point it at a ticker, or rank a curated set of tickers you choose, and it extracts the risk signals and forensic flags from the company's SEC filings - computed from the company's public SEC filings.

It surfaces evidence, not verdicts. It does not tell you a stock is clean or a landmine, does not advise buying or selling, and does not predict outcomes - the judgment is yours.

• Free & no API keys - runs entirely on no-account, no-key public data.
• SEC-registered filers - the ticker universe comes from SEC public data. There is no exchange filter: OTC-quoted names are scanned like any other, and the SEC file this is built from carries no NYSE American designation.
• Evidence-based - the signals that are computed come from the company's public SEC filings, and for event-driven red flags the specific 8-K item is named. Two contributors, valuation and coverage tone, have no data source in this build and are always suppressed (see Limitations).
• Transparent & tunable - a decomposable composite score with user-editable weights, screening presets (penny default / micro / small-cap-value / broad / custom), and selectable strategy profiles (hold default / trader / high-return / custom).
• No live prices - it does not fetch current price or assess tradeability; verify those yourself in a brokerage.
• Research only, not investment advice.

What it surfaces

For each company, PennyTune reads the SEC filings and grades the signals that matter most for a micro-cap. Any signal it cannot compute is suppressed and reported as such, never scored as a zero:

• Financial health & distress - Altman Z″ solvency scoring plus a forensic battery (Beneish earnings-manipulation and Piotroski strength models) over the company's filed financials.
• Dilution & corporate actions - shelf and ATM ("at-the-market") offerings, rising share counts and dilution velocity, serial reverse-splits, and auditor-change / restatement flags drawn from the 8-K record.
• Insider activity - open-market insider buying (the conviction signal), kept distinct from routine grants and tax-withholding so awards never read as bullish - plus Form 144 proposed-sale overhang and 13D/13G ownership activity.
• 8-K material events - the structured item-code tape, weighted by severity rather than raw count. Item 4.02, the issuer stating that its own previously issued financials can no longer be relied upon, is named and counted separately from an Item 4.01 change of auditor, alongside officer departures, listing-deficiency and the other material items.
• Delisting-notice risk - disclosed continued-listing deficiency notices (8-K Item 3.01), reported without guessing the price-clock day-count the tool cannot compute.
• Trading suspensions - a company with an SEC trading suspension in the last 180 days is flagged and held out. Note the tool does not track whether the suspension has since lapsed: SEC suspensions run at most 10 trading days, so a name can be held out on a suspension that has long expired.
• Fails-to-deliver - settlement-stress context from the SEC's twice-monthly fails-to-deliver data (context only - not evidence of manipulation on its own).
• SEC staff comment letters - whether the Division of Corporation Finance corresponded with the company in the last year, how many letters and registrant responses fall in that window, and the date of the most recent letter. Context only, never scored. The filing index records the letter but not its subject.
• Sector classification - each company's SIC sector is recorded and shown. It is context only: scoring uses fixed reference bands, not peer comparison.

How the score works

The composite is an unnormalized risk-weighted research score:

composite = sum(weight x positive sub-score) - sum(penalty x severity x confidence)

• Positive contributors are graded against fixed reference bands - the Piotroski 0-9 scale, the Altman Z-double-prime zones, and fixed EV/Sales and revenue-growth bands. A company's sub-score therefore depends only on its own filings, not on which other tickers were in the run, and is comparable across runs.
• Penalties subtract, scaled by severity and by the active preset.
• Lower means more filing-derived risk was found. It is not a valuation, not a prediction, and not comparable to a price target. A high score means "less risk was found in the filings", never "this will go up".
• The score is not clamped and has no fixed range; treat it as an ordering, not a magnitude.

A ticker with no fetched SEC evidence is not scored. It is reported as NOT ASSESSED, named on the console, and excluded from the ranking, so absence of evidence is never mistaken for absence of risk.

Financial health uses re-anchored cutoffs, not Altman's published bands. Altman Z-double-prime is computed with its published coefficients, but the solvency cutoffs are -3.0 and 1.0, not the published 1.1 and 2.6, and the sub-score is graded continuously rather than in three steps. Measured on 194 real filers, using going-concern language in each company's own annual report as an independent distress label: at the published cutoffs 0 of 41 going-concern filers were missed, but 47 of 153 healthy filers were called distressed - among them Starbucks, HP, AbbVie, Amgen, Oracle, Lowe's, Duke Energy and AT&T. The published 1.1 boundary sits at the 45th percentile of the real distribution. The re-anchored cutoffs cut that false-distress rate from 31% to 12% and still call no going-concern filer safe. This is a deliberate departure from the published model.

Exports carry suppressed, suppressed_count, evidence_complete and completeness columns, so a reader can tell an assessed row from an unassessed one without reading prose.

Limitations

Read these before trusting a ranking.

• Two contributors are permanently zero. valuation and sentiment have no data source in this build - there is no market-cap feed and no news feed - so they are suppressed for every company, on every run.
• Altman is not computable for roughly a quarter of large caps. Banks and REITs do not publish a classified balance sheet, and a number of large filers publish no operating-income subtotal. Where it cannot be computed it is suppressed and reported, never imputed - but the financial-health contributor is then missing entirely for that name.
• Most rows rest on incomplete evidence. In a representative 20-name scan, 18 names had at least one check that could not be run. The suppressed_count column tells you how many, per row.
• The tool ranks weakly, not authoritatively. It is useful for deciding which filings to read first. It is not a screen you should act on directly, and no single flag should be treated as a verdict.
• Comment-letter activity is history, not an open question. The SEC releases a staff letter no earlier than 20 business days after the review has closed, and the filing index carries no subject. The tool can tell you that correspondence happened and when; it cannot tell you what was asked or whether anything is still outstanding. A letter with no matching response filing is not an unanswered one - registrants routinely reply inside another filing.
• A watched name never alerts on its first run. Alerts are computed against the previous snapshot, so a company raises nothing until it has been scanned at least twice.
• No cache. Every run re-fetches from SEC EDGAR. The cache_ttl settings shown by config get are inert.

Data & attribution

PennyTune uses only public, no-key data from a single source: SEC EDGAR (the universe - from the SEC company_tickers_exchange.json listed-company file - and all filings, fundamentals, insider forms, and the fails-to-deliver / trading-suspension files). The only identity required anywhere is the SEC EDGAR User-Agent string (your name + email) - a request header the SEC's fair-access policy requires to identify the requester, not a PennyTune account, login, or key. It is stored only in your local config (redacted in config get), sent only in the SEC request header, and never transmitted to the author or any third party. Any valid personal email works; setup checks the format, not the provider.

PennyTune is a research tool and does not republish raw third-party datasets; your config and any exported results stay local (never committed).

Install

PennyTune is a command-line tool published on PyPI. Install it with pip - the simple, universal default:

pip install pennytune

Because it's a CLI, an isolated install (recommended for command-line tools) keeps it out of your other Python environments:

pipx install pennytune       # isolated install via pipx
uv tool install pennytune    # the same, via uv's tool installer

Requires Python 3.11-3.14 (all CI-tested across Linux, macOS, and Windows; 3.13 is the primary target for linting and type-checking).

From source (for development):

git clone https://github.com/lavellehatcherjr/pennytune
cd pennytune
uv sync --extra dev --extra schema   # or: pip install -e ".[dev,schema]"

Usage

First-time setup records the SEC EDGAR identity (a required request header - not a key) and the risk acknowledgment; scan/inspect refuse to run until both exist:

pennytune init --identity "Your Name you@example.com" --i-understand-the-risks

The primary workflow is inspect <TICKER> - point the tool at a company you already have and get its full forensic breakdown computed from the filings:

# Full evidence-backed breakdown for one ticker (the score, decomposed):
pennytune inspect GROW
pennytune --json inspect GROW | jq '.inspect'   # machine-readable

scan ranks a curated set of tickers you choose - given explicitly or read from your watchlist - by their SEC-filing risk signals (no price filtering - the tool fetches no prices). At most 100 tickers per run; PennyTune never scans the whole market. Positive sub-scores are graded against fixed reference bands, so a company's score does not depend on which other tickers were in the run and is comparable across runs. The ranking is nonetheless driven mainly by the risk/penalty signals (dilution, distress, delisting, insider selling), since those are what the filings support best. Tune the weighting and strategy with --preset / --profile:

pennytune scan AAA BBB CCC                       # rank the tickers you name
pennytune scan                                   # rank your watchlist (top 10)
pennytune --profile high-return scan AAA BBB --preset broad  # preset + profile
pennytune scan AAA BBB --exclude-serial-splitter --require-insider-buying

# Export the full ranked set (CSV/Parquet/JSON/Markdown); pipe clean JSON:
pennytune scan AAA BBB --format parquet
pennytune --json scan AAA BBB | jq '.results[0]'

# Offline / no-network run (degraded; no live SEC fetch):
pennytune --offline scan AAA BBB

Every other command:

pennytune --help              # all commands and global flags
pennytune --version           # app version + pinned dependency versions
pennytune disclaimer          # print the full legal disclaimer
pennytune watch add GROW NUKK # persistent watchlist (add | list | rm)
pennytune watch list          #   run-over-run score deltas
pennytune config get          # view all settings (EDGAR email redacted)
pennytune config set weights.valuation 1.5   # tune a scoring weight
pennytune config set profile custom          # switch to hand-tuned weights
pennytune sources             # data sources, rate limits, contacted domains

scan output leads with a header (active preset/profile + data-freshness lines), ranks the top N, and ends with the short disclaimer. Exported files carry the one-line disclaimer header so the disclaimer travels with the data.

Development

python -m pytest tests/ -v    # run the test suite
ruff check .                  # lint
python -m mypy                # type-check
pip-audit                     # supply-chain scan

Dependencies are hash-pinned in a committed uv.lock (supply-chain discipline). Upgrades are deliberate and reviewed; nothing auto-merges.

License

MIT. © Lavelle Hatcher Jr.

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⚠️ Disclaimer (repeated)

DISCLAIMER — PLEASE READ CAREFULLY

1. NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE. PennyTune is a research and educational tool
only. Nothing it produces is investment advice, financial advice, legal
advice, tax advice, trading advice, or a recommendation, offer, or
solicitation to buy, sell, or hold any security or to make any financial
transaction. Rankings, scores, signals, and any other output are the
result of automated rules applied to public data and are provided for
informational and educational purposes only.

2. NO ADVISER RELATIONSHIP; NOT REGISTERED. The author is not a licensed
or registered financial advisor, investment adviser, broker, broker-
dealer, or investment professional, and is not registered with the U.S.
Securities and Exchange Commission, FINRA, or any state or other
securities regulator. Use of this software creates no advisory,
fiduciary, brokerage, agency, or professional relationship of any kind
between you and the author. The author is not acting as a fiduciary to
you.

3. NO RELIANCE. You agree not to rely on this software or its output as
the basis for any investment, trading, or financial decision. Any and
all decisions you make are made solely by you, in your own independent
judgment, and at your own risk. You are solely and exclusively
responsible for your own investment decisions and their consequences.

4. EXTREME RISK OF PENNY STOCKS. Penny stocks and low-priced, micro-cap,
and sub-$1 securities are highly speculative and carry a substantial
risk of loss, up to and including the TOTAL LOSS of your investment.
They are subject to low liquidity, extreme volatility, wide bid-ask
spreads, limited or unreliable public information, fraud, market
manipulation (including pump-and-dump schemes), dilution, reverse
splits, trading halts, suspensions, and delisting. You should not invest
any money you cannot afford to lose entirely.

5. NO GUARANTEE; FORWARD-LOOKING. Scores, rankings, and signals are NOT
predictions and do NOT guarantee any outcome or result. Past performance
is not indicative of, and does not guarantee, future results. No
representation is made that any account will or is likely to achieve
profits or losses similar to any analysis, backtest, or example shown.

6. THIRD-PARTY DATA "AS IS." All data is obtained from third-party and
public sources (including SEC EDGAR and other public sources)
and is provided "AS IS." Such data may be inaccurate,
incomplete, delayed, out of date, or wrong. The author does not create,
endorse, verify, or guarantee any third-party data and makes no
representation or warranty as to its accuracy, completeness, timeliness,
or fitness. You must independently verify all information against primary
sources (such as official SEC filings) before acting on it.

7. NO WARRANTY. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, THE
SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS" AND "AS AVAILABLE," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY
KIND, EXPRESS, IMPLIED, OR STATUTORY, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE,
ACCURACY, AND NONINFRINGEMENT. THE AUTHOR DOES NOT WARRANT THAT THE
SOFTWARE WILL BE UNINTERRUPTED, ERROR-FREE, SECURE, OR THAT DEFECTS WILL
BE CORRECTED.

8. LIMITATION OF LIABILITY. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE
LAW, IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR OR ANY CONTRIBUTOR BE LIABLE FOR ANY
DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, PUNITIVE, OR
CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES, OR FOR ANY LOSS OF PROFITS, REVENUE, DATA, OR
INVESTMENT OR TRADING LOSSES, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE
SOFTWARE OR ITS USE OR OUTPUT, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT
(INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE), STRICT LIABILITY, OR OTHERWISE, EVEN IF ADVISED
OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. THIS LIMITATION APPLIES REGARDLESS OF
THE FAILURE OF ANY ESSENTIAL PURPOSE OF ANY LIMITED REMEDY.

9. INDEMNIFICATION. You agree to indemnify, defend, and hold harmless the
author and any contributors from and against any and all claims,
liabilities, damages, losses, costs, and expenses (including reasonable
legal fees) arising out of or related to your use of the software, your
investment or trading decisions, or your violation of this disclaimer.

10. COMPLIANCE. You are responsible for complying with all laws,
regulations, and rules applicable to you, including securities laws and
the terms of service of any data provider. The software is intended for
lawful personal and educational use only.

11. SEVERABILITY. If any provision of this disclaimer is held to be
invalid or unenforceable, that provision shall be limited or eliminated
to the minimum extent necessary, and the remaining provisions shall
remain in full force and effect.

12. NOT AFFILIATED WITH OR ENDORSED BY ANY REGULATOR. PennyTune is not
sponsored by, endorsed by, approved by, reviewed by, or affiliated with
the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), FINRA, the operators
of EDGAR, or any other government agency, regulator, or securities
exchange. References to "SEC," "EDGAR," and "SEC filings" identify only
the public data sources used and do not imply any endorsement,
partnership, or official status. No regulator sponsors, endorses,
reviews, or verifies PennyTune or its output.

13. INDEPENDENT PERSONAL PROJECT. PennyTune is a personal, independent,
open-source project. It is not a professional, advisory, or regulated
service, and nothing in it or its output constitutes professional or
regulated financial advice.

14. ACCEPTANCE. By installing, accessing, or using PennyTune, you
acknowledge that you have read, understood, and agree to this entire
disclaimer, and that you use the software entirely at your own risk. If
you do not agree, do not install or use the software.