What Reddit’s SEC Filings Said That the Market Ignored

Reddit is one of the most interesting stocks in the market right now. Not because the business is broken. Because the business looks great on the surface, and the filings tell a more complicated story underneath.

This is a teardown of both the FY2025 10-K and the Q1 2026 10-Q. Every number below comes verbatim from SEC filings. None of it is a prediction.

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The Numbers That Look Genuinely Good

Start with what is working, because a lot is working.

Revenue grew 69% in FY2025 to $2.2 billion. Gross margins came in at 91.2%. Free cash flow hit $684 million. Net income was $529.7 million. Operating expenses fell year-over-year even as revenue expanded, which is the operating leverage inflection every growth investor waits for.

Q1 2026 continued the trend. Revenue of $663.4 million, up 69% year-over-year again. Gross margins of 91.5%. Net income of $204 million. ARPU grew 44% year-over-year, driven by gains in both ad volumes and pricing, which suggests broad-based demand rather than a single lever being pulled.

The cash position is $2.8 billion. The company is generating $311 million of free cash flow per quarter. There is no debt crisis here.

If you stopped reading the filing at this point, Reddit looks like one of the best businesses in the market.

The Number That Caught My Eye

I ran the filing expecting to find the secret to their 69% revenue growth. Instead, I found a table that management completely ignored on the earnings call.

Here is Reddit’s logged-in DAUq year-over-year growth, reported quarterly, going back to 2024:

31% → 27% → 27% → 23% → 17% → 14% → 10% → 7%

Nine consecutive quarters of deceleration.

Logged-in users are the ones Reddit can actually monetise. They have accounts. They see personalised ads. They generate the engagement that advertisers pay premium rates to reach. Logged-out and international users browsing without an account generate a fraction of the ARPU.

The headline DAUq number looks better because overall user growth is running at 17% year-over-year. The gap between 17% total and 7% logged-in is the story. Reddit is adding users. It is adding fewer of the users that matter to the revenue model.

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The International Mix Problem

The majority of new user growth is coming from international markets. This is not inherently bad. It becomes a problem when you look at what international users are worth.

U.S. ARPU in FY2025 was $10.79. Rest of world ARPU was $7.04. That is a 35% gap. Reddit has been expanding internationally through machine translation, which automatically renders communities in local languages. The filing acknowledges that DAUq growth rates from machine translation may slow as rollout to major global languages is completed.

The mechanism driving headline user growth has a natural ceiling, and the users it adds generate meaningfully less revenue per user than the domestic base. The bull case is that international ARPU converges upward toward domestic rates as the ad product matures. That is plausible. It is also years away and depends on advertiser demand in markets where Reddit is not yet a scaled platform.

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The Part the Filing Buries

Here is where it gets interesting.

Reddit announced it will discontinue reporting logged-in DAUq as a metric entirely in Q3 2026.

They are removing the metric from public disclosure at the exact moment it hits 7% growth. The precise quarter when the gap between logged-in and total DAUq is widest. The precise period when the user mix is shifting most aggressively toward lower-monetisation cohorts.

The data will still exist internally. Investors just will not be able to see it.

The filing does not explain why this metric is being removed. The Q1 10-Q simply states it will be discontinued. That is management’s right. Public companies are not required to report every internal metric indefinitely.

But the timing is notable. This is not a metric they are retiring because it stopped being informative. It is a metric that has been reporting a nine-quarter deceleration trend, and it is being retired before it hits single digits.

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The Search Engine Question

One other item from the Q1 filing that deserves attention.

Management cited search engine algorithm favorability as a primary driver of recent DAUq growth. Reddit content has been surfacing more prominently in Google search results over the past two years, driving significant referral traffic.

The filing acknowledges that a reversal in search engine algorithm favorability would directly pressure DAUq with no clear internal offset.

This is an externally dependent growth driver that Reddit does not control. Google changes its algorithm regularly. The company that benefits from one update can suffer from the next.

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The Bull Case Is Not Dead

To be clear about what the filing does not say.

It does not say Reddit’s advertising business is deteriorating. Revenue is growing at 69%. ARPU is expanding. The platform has 91% gross margins and is generating real cash.

The bull case is that ARPU expansion can compensate for user growth deceleration. That international monetisation eventually converges toward domestic rates. That the community moat is durable and deep enough to keep advertisers paying premium rates. All of that is plausible.

The question is the multiple. At 25 to 30 times forward earnings, you are paying for a growth trajectory that the filed metrics suggest is getting harder to sustain. The revenue growth rate has remained at 69% across multiple quarters, which is impressive. The question is what drives the next phase of that growth when logged-in user growth is at 7% and the international ARPU gap remains meaningful.

What the Filing Actually Says

The 10-K was filed February 6, 2026. The 10-Q was filed May 1, 2026. Every number in this post was pulled directly from SEC XBRL structured data.

You can verify every claim against the original EDGAR filings right now:

Read the full 10-K Analysis

Read the full 10-Q Analysis

This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All data is sourced from SEC EDGAR public filings.

I ran it through Sharpread. The verdict came back: BEARISH. HIGH CONVICTION.

Five days later, the stock pumped 30% on a meme short squeeze.

Today, BYND trades under $1.

This is not a story about being right. The market can stay irrational longer than any model can stay solvent, and Sharpread does not predict price movements. This is a story about what the filing actually said, verbatim, before anyone was paying attention. And why reading the balance sheet matters more than reading the tape.

The Filing

I ran the ticker expecting a standard cash-burn teardown, but the net income line stopped me in my tracks.

The headline numbers, pulled directly from SEC XBRL:

• Revenue: $275.5M (down 15.6% YoY)

• Operating loss: -$333.6M

• Reported net income: $219.0M

• Total debt: $415.7M

• EPS: $1.15

A company with a $333M operating loss somehow reported positive net income and positive EPS. That’s not a turnaround, that’s an accounting artifact.

Red Flag 1: The Reported Profit Is Not Real

From the filing, verbatim:

“Although we recorded net income of $219.0 million in 2025, primarily driven by the gain on debt restructuring, net of exchange fees, of $548.7 million resulting from the Exchange Offer, we incurred loss from operations of $333.6 million in 2025.”

The sole source of Beyond Meat's reported net income was a $548.7M non-cash debt restructuring gain. The company completed an October 2025 debt exchange that retired a significant portion of its outstanding notes at a discount. That one-time gain was large enough to flip a $333.6M operating loss into a reported profit.

This is legal, but it’s also a number that will never appear again.

If you only looked at the headline EPS on a stock screener, you'd think they pulled off a miracle. But the operating reality is a massive loss. The reported profit is just a treasury transaction.

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Red Flag 2: Cash Outflows Are Getting Worse, Not Better

From the filing, verbatim:

“In 2025, 2024 and 2023, we incurred negative cash flows from operating activities of $144.9 million, $98.8 million and $107.8 million, respectively.”

This is the sentence that matters. Three consecutive years of negative operating cash flow, and the trajectory in 2025 is the worst of the three.

The operating cash outflow widened from $98.8M to $144.9M in a single year, against a backdrop of significant workforce cuts and operational restructuring. The cost reduction strategy is not working fast enough to offset revenue deterioration. The company is burning more cash now than it was two years ago, despite three years of cost-cutting programs.

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Red Flag 3: Three Years of Losses With No Recovery

From the filing, verbatim:

“Net revenues decreased to $275.5 million in 2025 from $326.5 million in 2024, representing a 15.6% decrease... loss from operations of $333.6 million in 2025 (compared to loss from operations of $156.1 million and $341.9 million, in 2024 and 2023, respectively).”

Revenue has declined persistently across every year in the disclosure window. The operating loss in 2025 is near the worst level in the three-year period, and there is no durable improvement in the operating cost structure to point to. Three years of restructuring programs, three years of losses.

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Red Flag 4: Stranded Assets in China

From the filing, verbatim:

“As a result of our decision to suspend our operational activities in China, we have recorded $6.4 million in accelerated depreciation related to the reassessment.”

Beyond Meat has ceased operations in China, recording $6.4M in accelerated depreciation on stranded assets. The broader Global Operations Review continues to generate non-cash write-down risk. For a company already burning cash at an accelerating rate, further write-downs compress the runway further.

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What Management Said

Sharpread classifies management tone as DEFENSIVE on this filing.

The guidance section of the 10-K contains no explicit quantitative targets. Management describes a focus on “expanding market share in select markets and geographies” and “gross margin expansion” without providing numbers, timelines, or specific milestones.

When a company’s own lawyers draft risk factors contemplating the failure of their core turnaround strategy, you should probably listen to them.

The category headwinds are documented in the filing directly:

“We have experienced significant and continued declining net revenues due to decreased consumer demand for plant-based meat products.”

This is not spin. It is the company’s own assessment of its competitive position.

The Price Action

When the BYND 10-K filed on April 9, Sharpread returned its verdict: BEARISH, HIGH CONVICTION.

The stock moved -0.50% on the day of filing. By April 14, it was up 20%. By April 16, it had pumped 30.33%.

This is what a meme short squeeze looks like against a high short-interest stock. The fundamentals did not change. The XBRL numbers did not change. The operating losses did not change. The market briefly became irrational, as markets do, and then continued in the direction the filing pointed.

BYND now trades under $1.

We do not predict the casino. We read the balance sheet. The balance sheet was right.

Why I Built This

I believe in doing your homework before you buy a stock. Real homework. The kind that means opening the actual filing, not reading a summary of a summary on a finance aggregator.

The problem is that a 10-K can run 200 pages. The risk factors alone can be 40 pages of dense legal language. Most investors do not have days to spend on a single position, and the ones who do are mostly professionals with Bloomberg terminals and analyst teams.

I got tired of that being the only option.

So I tried using AI to speed it up. That worked right up until it started confidently citing revenue figures that did not exist in the filing. Plausible numbers, wrong filing, completely made up. I only found out because I happened to check. Most people don’t!

The hallucination problem is not a prompt engineering issue. It is architectural. The model doesn’t know what it doesn’t know, and when it guesses, it guesses convincingly.

So I built two hard rules into the architecture.

First: the AI is permanently banned from doing math. Hard numbers come directly from the SEC’s XBRL structured data feeds. The model only reads the text.

Second: no paraphrasing without receipts. For every qualitative claim, the model has to return the verbatim sentence from the filing. If it can’t find the source sentence, the claim gets dropped entirely.

We live in the data. Not in summaries of it, not in AI interpretations of it. The actual structured data the company filed with the government.

The BYND cash flow deterioration is a good example of why that second rule matters. “Cash outflows are getting worse” does not survive summarisation intact. The exact language, three specific dollar figures across three consecutive years in one sentence, is the finding. The moment you paraphrase it, you lose the weight.

What Sharpread Actually Does

Every number in this teardown was pulled directly from SEC EDGAR’s XBRL structured data. Not estimated, not summarised by an AI, not sourced from a financial data aggregator. The raw filing, the raw structured data.

Every qualitative claim is linked back to the verbatim paragraph in the actual SEC EDGAR filing. You can click through to the highlighted sentence in the government document right now.

Read the full BYND analysis on Sharpread

Every Week

I publish one teardown like this every week. No price targets. No buy or sell recommendations. Just the raw filings, the XBRL data, and what the company’s own lawyers wrote down.

If you want to run your own analysis on any US ticker, the first 10 are free at sharpread.ai. No card required. Just the filing.

This post is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. All data is sourced from SEC EDGAR public filings and XBRL structured data. Always conduct your own research and consult a licensed financial adviser before making any investment decision.