When a US public company does something that matters — closes an acquisition, loses a CFO, gets delisted, discloses a cybersecurity breach — it has four business days to file an 8-K with the SEC. That filing is the primary source every financial news outlet reads. You can read it too, before they write the story, and you can read it as structured data.
The problem most people hit: the 8-K itself is a document. To know what happened you seem to have to open it and read. But you don't. The event type is already encoded, and once you know where to look, a whole category of "monitor a company for material events" becomes a single structured query.
The item code is the whole game
Every 8-K is tagged with one or more item numbers from a fixed list the SEC defines. The item tells you the kind of event without reading a word of the body:
2.01 — Completion of an acquisition or disposition of assets (M&A closed)
