How to Read an Annual Report and Canadian Filings

There is no filing in Canada called an annual report. Not in the rules, at any rate. What a Canadian public company actually produces is an annual disclosure set: separate documents, filed under separate sections of securities law, on separate deadlines. Several of the things an investor most wants to know live in exactly one member of that set, and the glossy book with the photographs on the cover is the one part of it the company designed itself. Some of the pages you want are not in the book at all, and no amount of careful reading will find them.

So this guide maps the set, lays out the clocks, and works three things through properly: where the fourth quarter goes and why NI 51-102 requires no fourth quarterly filing, why the extra week in a 53-week retail year distorts a profit margin as well as a revenue total, and why the order of the risk factors in an annual information form is itself information.

Two companies do the teaching. Loblaw Companies Limited, which trades on the Toronto Stock Exchange under L, supplies the quarter-counting and the note. Cameco Corporation, which trades on the TSX under CCO and on the New York Stock Exchange under CCJ, supplies the annual information form. Neither appears here as a recommendation. All figures are as reported in the filings named, for Loblaw’s fiscal year of 53 weeks ended January 3, 2026 and Cameco’s financial year ended December 31, 2025, in Canadian dollars because both companies report in them.

“Annual report” is not a legal term in Canada

The rule that governs almost all of this is National Instrument 51-102 Continuous Disclosure Obligations, adopted by the provincial and territorial securities regulators. Continuous disclosure is the body of obligations that apply to a company for as long as it is public, as distinct from the one-time prospectus it files to go public. Page references below are to the Ontario Securities Commission’s unofficial consolidation of NI 51-102.

The instrument imposes no obligation to produce an annual report, and it nowhere defines one. The phrase turns up exactly twice. Once in section 9.1.1(2)(b), page 57, a carve-out barring a company that sends proxy materials by notice-and-access from including documents about matters to be submitted to the meeting, subject to listed exceptions, the second of which reads: “financial statements of the reporting issuer to be approved at the meeting and MD&A related to those financial statements, which may be part of an annual report.” A container the statements and MD&A may be part of, mentioned in passing and never required. And once in the definition of AIF at section 1.1, page 4, which says that for an SEC issuer the AIF may be “an annual report or transition report under the 1934 Act on Form 10-K or Form 20-F”. That is the United States arrangement handed over by our own rule: there, the annual report is a filed document that can stand in for the AIF. Here, it is packaging.

The main filings are below, some annual and some firing on events, with the clocks they run on. The column that matters most is the third.

Document	The rule that requires it	What is in it that is in nothing else	Deadline, non-venture	Deadline, venture
Audited annual financial statements and notes	NI 51-102 Part 4, s.4.2, pp.15-16	The auditor’s opinion, and the matters the auditor’s report singles out. The notes, which are where the labels on the statements get defined.	90 days after year end, or sooner on the test below	120 days, same test
Annual MD&A	NI 51-102 Part 5, Form 51-102F1, s.5.1(2), p.35	The eight-quarter table (item 1.5), the fourth-quarter discussion (item 1.10), critical accounting estimates (item 1.12, non-venture issuers only), related party transactions (item 1.9), and the three-year selected annual information (item 1.3).	Same deadline as the statements	Same
Annual information form, the AIF	NI 51-102 Part 6, Form 51-102F2, s.6.1 and s.6.2, p.39	Ranked risk factors (5.2), legal proceedings (12.1), regulatory actions (12.2), mineral and oil and gas disclosure (5.4 and 5.5), credit ratings (7.3), and director and officer cease trade orders, bankruptcies, penalties or sanctions (10.2).	90 days	Not required to file one
Management information circular	NI 51-102 Part 9, Forms 51-102F5 and 51-102F6, s.9.3, p.60	What the executives and the directors are paid, and how that was decided. The executive compensation disclosure runs on a clock of its own under s.9.3.1(2.2), pp.60-61: 140 days after the year end, or 180 days for a venture issuer.	Promptly, once it is sent to securityholders	Same
Material change report	NI 51-102 Part 7, Form 51-102F3, s.7.1(1)(b), p.40	What changed between the annual documents.	News release immediately, report within 10 days	Same
Business acquisition report	NI 51-102 Part 8, Form 51-102F4, s.8.2, pp.41-42	Financial statements of a business the company bought.	75 days, or 90 if the acquired business’s year ended 45 days or less before the acquisition date	75 days, or 120 on the same condition
Change of auditor notice and reporting package	NI 51-102 Part 4, s.4.11, p.26	That the auditor changed, and any reportable event behind it: a disagreement, a consultation, or an unresolved issue, with the departing auditor’s own letter attached where that auditor provides one.	3, 7 and 14 days from the termination or resignation	Same
Certificates of annual filings	NI 52-109, Form 52-109F1	A certification of the annual filings, filed on its own rather than inside any of them.
Insider reports on SEDI	NI 55-104, s.3.3, p.9	What the insiders themselves bought and sold.	Within five days of the change in ownership or control	Same
The glossy annual report	No rule	Whatever the company wants.

MD&A stands for management’s discussion and analysis: the company’s own narrative explanation of the numbers, in a format the regulator prescribes item by item. The AIF is a reference document about the business itself, not about the year’s results. The circular is the package sent to shareholders ahead of the annual meeting, and it is where compensation normally lives. SEDI is the online system through which insiders report their own trades.

Now the last row, because it is the point. Loblaw binds its MD&A and its audited statements into one PDF, adds a letter from the chief executive, and calls the result its 2025 Annual Report. That document is a wrapper around two of the regulated filings. It does not contain the AIF and it does not contain the compensation disclosure. The wrapper is not a trick: it is a packaging decision, made by the company, with no rule behind it.

Every regulated filing in that table goes to SEDAR+, the national filing system run by the securities regulators, except the insider reports, which go to SEDI instead. Form 51-102F1 item 1.15 requires the MD&A to point you at the first of those: it must state that additional information about the company, including its AIF if it files one, is on SEDAR+. The same item, at limb (c) on page 17, requires the MD&A to include the disclosure required by National Instrument 52-109 Certification of Disclosure in Issuers’ Annual and Interim Filings and, as applicable, by Form 52-109F1 Certification of Annual Filings – Full Certificate. The certificate itself is filed separately, on that form. If you have the glossy PDF and nothing else, you have the wrapper and a pointer at the rest.

The deadlines decide what you can know, and when

The table above carries the annual clocks. Three further obligations do not sit on a document of their own: two govern the interim filings, and one governs a table inside the MD&A.

What	Rule, and page in the consolidation	Non-venture issuer	Venture issuer
Interim financial report and interim MD&A	s.4.4, p.18 and s.5.1, p.35	45 days after the interim period	60 days
Interim MD&A content, and neither class files one for the fourth quarter	Form 51-102F1 item 2.2.1, p.19, instruction (v) to item 2.2, p.19, and instruction (iii) to section 2.2.1, p.20	Full interim MD&A	Quarterly Highlights permitted instead
Contractual obligations table in the MD&A	Form 51-102F1, instruction (iv) to item 1.6, p.11	Required, payments due for each of the next five years and thereafter	Not required

Two cells across the two tables hide something worth reading in the original. The first is section 4.2, the statements row of the annual table above, which is not simply 90 days. The statements are due “on or before the earlier of (i) the 90th day after the end of its most recently completed financial year; and (ii) the date of filing, in a foreign jurisdiction, annual financial statements for its most recently completed financial year”. For a dual-listed issuer like Cameco, a foreign filing can pull the Canadian deadline forward, and 90 days is the outer limit rather than the date.

The second is instruction (iii) to section 2.2.1 of Form 51-102F1, page 20, which governs the venture issuer’s Quarterly Highlights: “Quarterly highlights prepared in accordance with section 2.2.1 are not required for your company’s fourth quarter as relevant fourth quarter content will be contained in your company’s annual MD&A prepared in accordance with Item 1 (see section 1.10).” That is the fourth-quarter finding below arriving from a second direction, out of a different item and for a different class of issuer.

Read the statements row of the table above against the circular row. The audited statements are due at 90 days and the executive compensation disclosure at 140. For a company whose financial year ends on December 31, the results arrive in March and the pay arrives as late as May 20, in a separate document. That gap is structural, it is up to 50 days wide, and it is why compensation gets its own section below.

Venture issuer is a defined term, and it is about the listing

Much of that turns on the phrase, so it needs defining precisely. NI 51-102 defines it at section 1.1, page 13, by exclusion: a venture issuer is a reporting issuer that did not have any of its securities listed or quoted on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Aequitas NEO Exchange Inc., a United States marketplace, or a marketplace outside Canada and the United States other than the London Stock Exchange’s Alternative Investment Market or the PLUS markets.

In plain terms: a TSX listing makes a company non-venture, and a TSX Venture or Canadian Securities Exchange listing does not, because neither is among the exclusions. The test is the listing, not the size of the company, and it is applied at the end of the financial period for Parts 4 and 5 and Form 51-102F1, and at the end of the most recently completed financial year for Parts 6 and 9.

Section 6.1 is one line: “A reporting issuer that is not a venture issuer must file an AIF.” Nothing in it bars a venture issuer from filing one voluntarily. What you cannot assume is that the document exists. The smaller company’s disclosure is thinner by design rather than by neglect.

Inside the annual MD&A: fifteen mandated sections

Form 51-102F1’s Item 1 governs the annual MD&A in fifteen numbered sections, while its Item 2 governs interim MD&A in five more, and the Ontario Securities Commission’s unofficial consolidation of Form 51-102F1 is the form itself. Item 1 runs, in order: 1.1 Date, 1.2 Overall Performance, 1.3 Selected Annual Information, 1.4 Discussion of Operations, 1.5 Summary of Quarterly Results, 1.6 Liquidity, 1.7 Capital Resources, 1.8 Off-Balance Sheet Arrangements, 1.9 Transactions Between Related Parties, 1.10 Fourth Quarter, 1.11 Proposed Transactions, 1.12 Critical Accounting Estimates, 1.13 Changes in Accounting Policies including Initial Adoption, 1.14 Financial Instruments and Other Instruments, and 1.15 Other MD&A Requirements.

Knowing the item numbers pays, because they tell you what must be in the document somewhere, under whatever heading the company chose. Five of the fifteen do most of the work.

Item	What the form requires	Why you read it
1.3 Selected Annual Information, pp.6-7	For each of the three most recently completed financial years: total revenue; profit or loss from continuing operations attributable to owners of the parent and profit or loss attributable to owners of the parent, each in total, per share and diluted per share; total assets; total non-current financial liabilities; and distributions or cash dividends declared per share for each class of share.	Six items, three years. The only mandated multi-year series of historical annual results in the MD&A, and it is unspun.
1.5 Summary of Quarterly Results, p.8	For each of the eight most recently completed quarters: total revenue, and profit or loss on both bases above, each in total, per share and diluted per share, plus a discussion of the variation across quarters and of seasonality.	The only place the form requires the quarters side by side, and the only place a fourth quarter appears at all. Revenue and profit only.
1.9 Transactions Between Related Parties, p.13	The company’s transactions with related parties.	Money moving between the company and people connected to it.
1.10 Fourth Quarter, p.13	A narrative. Quoted in full below.	The entire mandated fourth-quarter discussion, and it requires no number at all.
1.12 Critical Accounting Estimates, pp.14-15	For a company that is not a venture issuer, an analysis of its critical accounting estimates.	Management telling you which figures on the statements are judgements rather than counts.

Item 1.3 worked: three years, and the line underneath the line

Loblaw prints its item 1.3 disclosure as section 5.3, Selected Financial Information, on printed page 15 of the 2025 Annual Report. The column headings carry the week counts, which decide whether the three columns are comparable.

Line	2025, 53 weeks	2024, 52 weeks	2023, 52 weeks
Revenue	$63,903m	$60,123m	$58,681m
Net earnings available to common shareholders	$2,667m	$2,155m	$2,088m
of which continuing operations	$2,531m	$1,940m	$2,039m
Diluted net earnings per common share	$2.22	$1.75	$1.63
of which continuing operations	$2.11	$1.58	$1.59
Total assets	$41,577m	$40,880m	$38,979m
Total long term debt	$8,613m	$8,201m	$7,852m
Lease liabilities	$10,414m	$10,183m	$9,458m
Long term financial liabilities	$19,027m	$18,384m	$17,310m
Dividends declared per common share	$0.551	$0.496	$0.436

Now read the second row against the third. Between 2023 and 2024 the headline line rose and the business fell. Net earnings available to common shareholders went from $2,088m to $2,155m, up 3.2% on our arithmetic. On the continuing-operations line directly beneath it, the same two years went from $2,039m to $1,940m, down 4.9%. Diluted earnings per share splits the same way: $1.63 to $1.75 on the headline, up 7.4%, and $1.59 to $1.58 on continuing operations, down 0.6%. The split shows at all only because item 1.3 requires both profit bases, and only one of them is the business you would be buying. The reason is PC Financial, which section 5.3’s introduction says the company has moved into discontinued operations: the results of a business being sold, reported on their own line and stripped out of the continuing figures in the current year and in every comparative year shown. Our guide to how to read financial statements walks the statements it comes off.

The heading is worth checking against the rule. Item 1.3 mandates profit or loss attributable to owners of the parent. Loblaw prints net earnings available to common shareholders of the Company, which footnote (i) to section 5.3 defines as net earnings attributable to shareholders of the Company “net of dividends declared on the Company’s Second Preferred Shares, Series B and the impact of the redemption of these shares”. In 2024 those are not one figure: the consolidated statements of earnings, printed page 82, show $2,171m attributable to “Shareholders of the Company (note 9)”, against $2,155m on section 5.3’s line. A $16m difference, and footnote (i) is what accounts for it. The mandated item is a floor, not a format.

Two more things the table gives you cheaply.

One line in it is the sum of two others, and it foots. Long term financial liabilities of $19,027m is total long term debt of $8,613m plus lease liabilities of $10,414m, and the same addition closes in 2024 and 2023. That is the cheapest check in the set, and it takes ten seconds. The debt row carries footnote (ii): total long term debt at January 3, 2026 “includes $2,722 million long term debt classified as liabilities associated with assets held for sale”.

The fifty-third week sits in the 2025 column. Revenue rose $5,222m over the two years, from $58,681m to $63,903m, and $1,138m of that is the extra week, a figure the full-year table on page 68 of the same report pins down. Dividends declared per common share are up 26.4% over the same two years, and it is worth separating the two kinds of row: the flow lines, revenue, profit and earnings per share, scale with the number of weeks in the year, while the as-at lines do not and a per-share dividend is a rate no week count can touch.

The extra week reaches this table too, which is why the reading routine at the end of this guide reaches item 1.3 at step 2, straight after the week counts. Item 1.3 is where to stop reading and start comparing: six specified lines over three years, chosen by the form rather than by the company.

Finding one: the fourth quarter has no filing of its own

In any year other than one in which the company changes its year end, Canadian issuers file three interim reports, not four. NI 51-102 defines no fourth interim period, and the form that governs the MD&A says in terms that no interim MD&A is required for the fourth quarter either.

The definition everything turns on

NI 51-102, Part 1, page 6:

“interim period” means, (a) in the case of a year other than a non-standard year or a transition year, a period commencing on the first day of the financial year and ending nine, six or three months before the end of the financial year; (a.1) in the case of a non-standard year, a period commencing on the first day of the financial year and ending within 22 days of the date that is nine, six or three months before the end of the financial year; or …

Three dates, so three interim periods, so three interim filings. There is no fourth, because three months after the third is the year end itself, and the year end is covered by the annual filings. The paragraph marked by the ellipsis is paragraph (b), which defines interim periods for a transition year, the year in which a company changes its year end, with dates running to twelve months as well: section 4.8(7), page 22, contemplates interim periods ending “three, six, nine or twelve months after the end of its old financial year”. A company that moves its year end can therefore have four interim reports.

Paragraph (a.1) governs the worked example below. The same section defines a non-standard year as “a financial year, other than a transition year, that does not have 365 days, or 366 days if it includes February 29”. A company that counts its year in whole weeks therefore has a non-standard year every year: 52 weeks is 364 days and 53 weeks is 371, and neither is 365. That is what makes a quarter structure of twelve, twelve, sixteen and twelve weeks lawful rather than a breach of the three-month rule. The 22-day tolerance in (a.1) is the clause doing the work, and the rule bends to the retailer’s calendar rather than the other way round.

The consequence shows up in what each report contains. Section 4.3(2), pages 16-17, requires year-to-date statements in every interim report, and then, for interim periods other than the first, “a statement of comprehensive income for the three month period ending on the last day of the interim period”. So the second-quarter report carries a three-month column and the third-quarter report carries one. The fourth quarter does not, because no fourth interim report is required to carry it. The annual financial statements report the full financial year, not three months of it.

What a reader gets about a fourth quarter is therefore two things: the last column of the eight-quarter table at item 1.5, and the narrative at item 1.10. Here is item 1.10 in full:

Discuss and analyze fourth quarter events or items that affected your company’s financial condition, financial performance or cash flows, year-end and other adjustments, seasonal aspects of your company’s business and dispositions of business segments. If your company has filed separate MD&A for its fourth quarter, you may satisfy this requirement by incorporating that MD&A by reference.

Read it twice. It is a narrative requirement. It does not oblige the company to print a single number. Its second sentence shows the form contemplating a fourth-quarter MD&A that it does not require, and instruction (v) to item 2.2, which governs interim MD&A, is explicit:

Interim MD&A prepared in accordance with Item 2 is not required for your company’s fourth quarter as relevant fourth quarter content will be contained in your company’s annual MD&A prepared in accordance with Item 1 (see section 1.10).

A separately filed fourth-quarter MD&A is possible, and worth reading if you find one, but the default the rule builds is an annual document carrying the quarter rather than a filing of its own.

One instruction stops the eight-quarter table from being merely historical. Instruction (i) to item 1.5: “In the case of the annual MD&A, your most recently completed quarter is the quarter that ended on the last day of your most recently completed financial year.” The eighth column is the fourth quarter, and the seven figures item 1.5 requires in it, revenue plus the two profit measures each in total, per share and diluted per share, are the only fourth-quarter figures NI 51-102 and its forms require.

Instruction (vi) to item 2.2 adds something useful: “In your interim MD&A, update the summary of quarterly results in section 1.5 by providing summary information for the eight most recently completed quarters.” The table is not an annual artefact. It is refiled every quarter on a rolling eight-quarter window, which means you can follow one quarter across four successive filings and see whether its figures were restated on the way.

Loblaw’s eight quarters, and what the week counts do to them

Loblaw does not end its quarters on calendar month ends. It counts weeks, and it explains the calendar on page 30 of its 2025 Annual Report:

The Company follows a 52-week reporting cycle which periodically necessitates a fiscal year of 53 weeks due to an accounting convention common in the retail industry. Fiscal year 2025 was 53 weeks and fiscal year 2024 was 52 weeks. The 52-week reporting cycle is divided into four quarters of 12 weeks each except for the third quarter, which is 16 weeks in duration. When a fiscal year contains 53 weeks, the fourth quarter is 13 weeks in duration.

So Loblaw’s quarters are not equal and never were: the third is a third longer than the first two by design, and in a 53-week year the fourth is a week longer again. Fiscal 2025 ended January 3, 2026 and fiscal 2024 ended December 28, 2024.

The company’s item 1.5 table, on that same page 30, prints the week count in each column heading. The first three columns below are the company’s; the fourth is our arithmetic, dividing each quarter’s revenue by its own week count. Figures are the continuing retail business: Loblaw reports PC Financial separately as discontinued operations following the announced sale to EQ Bank.

Period	Weeks, as the company prints them	Revenue, C$ millions	Revenue per week, our arithmetic
Q1 2024	12	13,351	1,112.6
Q2 2024	12	13,715	1,142.9
Q3 2024	16	18,332	1,145.8
Q4 2024	12	14,725	1,227.1
Fiscal 2024	52	60,123	1,156.2
Q1 2025	12	13,904	1,158.7
Q2 2025	12	14,457	1,204.8
Q3 2025	16	19,160	1,197.5
Q4 2025	13	16,382	1,260.2
Fiscal 2025	53	63,903	1,205.7

The table checks out on its own terms, which is the first thing to do with any table you intend to rely on. The four 2025 quarters sum to 63,903 exactly and the four 2024 quarters to 60,123 exactly. The week counts sum to 53 and 52 respectively.

Check one more thing before you use it: whether the figures still mean what they meant when they were first reported. The company’s introduction to the table, immediately above it on page 30, is a restatement flag:

The following is a summary of selected consolidated financial information derived from the Company’s unaudited interim period condensed consolidated financial statements for each of the eight most recently completed quarters. As a result of the announcement of the sale of PC Financial, the results of PC Financial, net of intersegment eliminations, are presented separately as discontinued operations in the Company’s current and comparative results.

The footnotes under the consolidated statements of earnings, printed page 82, say it a second way:

(i) Adjusted to reflect discontinued operations. See note 5 “Assets Held for Sale and Discontinued Operations”. (ii) Adjusted to reflect the four-for-one stock split effective at the close of business on August 18, 2025.

Both restatements reach forward as well as back. PC Financial is out of the “current and comparative results”, so the 2025 quarters are re-cut as well as the 2024 ones. The split took effect at the close of business on August 18, 2025, and the report states that “All share, equity award and per share amounts presented herein have been retrospectively adjusted to reflect the stock split”, so a quarter that ended before that date appears here on a per-share basis that did not exist when it was reported. A figure copied out of an older filing and set beside this table compares two definitions of the same quarter. When a company restates it says so, above the table or in a footnote below the statement.

Source: Loblaw Companies Limited 2025 Annual Report, Summary of Consolidated Quarterly Results, page 30. Revenue per week is our arithmetic on the revenue row and the printed week counts.

Read down the revenue column as printed and the third quarter of 2025 is the biggest quarter in the table, at $19,160 million, beating the second quarter by $4,703 million. Divide by weeks and the ranking inverts: $1,204.8 million a week in the second quarter against $1,197.5 million in the third. The four extra weeks more than account for that gap, because four weeks at either quarter’s own per-week rate, $4,819 million or $4,790 million, exceeds the $4,703 million the third quarter won by. The two quarters earned roughly the same per week, and one of them lasted longer.

The company’s commentary on the same table, page 31, lists among the factors behind the variation “seasonality, which was greatest in the fourth quarter and least in the first quarter”. That is true per week, $1,260.2 million against $1,158.7 million in the first quarter, and invisible in the raw table, where the fourth quarter looks smaller than the third because sixteen weeks of ordinary trading outweighs thirteen weeks of busy trading. Both readings come out of the same ten numbers. Only one of them is about the business.

What the fourth quarter costs you read raw

Loblaw publishes more than the rule requires here, which gives us a controlled experiment. Its table on page 67, “Impact of the 13th Week and 53rd Week on Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 Results”, shows the fourth quarter both as reported over thirteen weeks and on a comparable twelve-week basis, and describes the week it strips out as an approximate impact, which is worth holding on to. Everything in it is the company’s, including the percentages. The first six rows are the continuing retail business, and the adjusted diluted earnings per share row is the total company.

	Q4 2025, 13 weeks	Q4 2025, comparable 12 weeks	Q4 2024, 12 weeks	Change as reported	Change comparable
Revenue	$16,382m	$15,244m	$14,725m	11.3%	3.5%
Gross profit	$5,047m	$4,730m	$4,554m	10.8%	3.9%
Gross profit %	30.8%	31.0%	30.9%
Operating income	$1,134m	$1,028m	$793m	43.0%	29.6%
Adjusted EBITDA	$1,775m	$1,669m	$1,595m	11.3%	4.6%
Depreciation and amortisation	$613m	$613m	$680m	(9.9)%	(9.9)%
Adjusted diluted earnings per share, total company	$0.67	$0.61	$0.55	21.8%	10.9%

Operating income grew 43.0% as reported and 29.6% on the comparable basis. Same quarter, same company, same filing. The difference between the two columns of percentages is one week of trading placed against a comparative period that did not have it.

Four of those rows are the company’s own measures rather than the auditor’s. Loblaw’s consolidated statements of earnings, page 82, strike no gross profit subtotal between revenue and operating income, and gross profit, gross profit percentage, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted diluted earnings per share appear on no statement at all. Gross profit is defined instead in the report’s Glossary of Terms, where the entries read in full “Gross profit Revenue less cost of sales” and “Gross profit percentage Gross profit divided by revenue”. Each of those four rows carries an endnote, which in the MD&A, printed page 76, reads:

(2) See Section 16 “Non-GAAP and Other Financial Measures”, which includes the reconciliation of such non-GAAP and other measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures.

Measures like these have a national rule of their own, National Instrument 52-112 Disclosure of Non-GAAP and Other Financial Measures, and that endnote is the pointer to the reconciliation. It does not make them bad measures: the comparable-basis tables on pages 67 and 68 are non-GAAP from top to bottom, and they are where the report separates the extra week from the business. The point is that they are traceable to what they were built from, and here that is Section 16 of the MD&A.

Three pieces of arithmetic close the loop, all three ours on the company’s printed figures.

One. Take the per-week growth rate. Revenue per week went from $1,227.1 million in the fourth quarter of 2024 to $1,260.2 million in the fourth quarter of 2025, growth of 2.70%. Put the thirteenth week back by multiplying by 13/12, carrying the per-week figures unrounded, and you get 11.2530%. That is the reported number: $16,382m against $14,725m is growth of $1,657m, and $1,657m on $14,725m is 11.2530%, which the company printed as 11.3%.

Two. Come at it from the other end. The comparable twelve weeks grew by $15,244m less $14,725m, which is $519m, or 3.5246% of the base. The thirteenth week by itself added $16,382m less $15,244m, which is $1,138m, or 7.7284% of the same base. Add them: 3.5246% plus 7.7284% is 11.2530%. The identical figure, decomposed into the part that is business performance and the part that is calendar.

Three. The thirteenth week and the fifty-third week are the same week, provable from two different tables. Out of the quarterly table, $16,382m less $15,244m is $1,138m. Out of the full-year table on page 68, $63,903m less $62,765m is also $1,138m. The extra week fell inside the fourth quarter, so the fourth quarter absorbed all of it.

Source: Loblaw Companies Limited 2025 Annual Report, Impact of the 13th Week and 53rd Week on Fourth Quarter and Fiscal 2025 Results, page 67. The thirteenth week’s own revenue, gross profit and margin are our arithmetic on the two columns the company printed.

Dividing by weeks is the crude fix, and here it understated the growth: dividing gave 2.70%, the comparable basis gives 3.5%. Dividing by thirteen assumes the extra week was an average week of the quarter, and it was not. $1,138 million against a quarter averaging $1,260.2 million a week means the extra week ran about 9.7% below the quarter’s average by our arithmetic. You cannot know the direction of that error in advance: a week trading above the quarter’s average would push the division the other way, and how it traded is something the company knows and you do not.

So the rule for a reader: use the company’s comparable basis when it provides one, because it knows which week it added and you do not. Divide by weeks only when no comparable basis is given, and say that is what you did. The same distortion runs through multi-year annual revenue series, where a 53-week year makes one step look too strong and the next too weak, and our guide to how to research a stock works that version through on Dollarama using exactly this division as its fix. Loblaw’s disclosure puts a size on what the division missed here, roughly eight tenths of a percentage point of revenue growth. The next section shows the one thing division cannot repair at all.

Finding two: the extra week moves the ratios too

A reader who has absorbed the point so far will reach for ratios next, and the reasoning is sound enough to be dangerous: a margin is a share of a period, and a share should not care how long the period is. Thirteen weeks of revenue and thirteen weeks of profit divide out, and the week cancels.

Loblaw’s own table says otherwise. Gross profit is revenue less the cost of the goods sold, gross margin is that figure as a percentage of revenue, and a basis point is one hundredth of a percentage point.

• Gross margin as reported: 30.8% in the fourth quarter of 2025 against 30.9% a year earlier. Down 10 basis points.
• Gross margin on the comparable twelve-week basis: 31.0% against 30.9%. Up 10 basis points.

A 20 basis point swing between the two bases, and they disagree about the direction of travel. One says the company sold its goods slightly less profitably than the year before, the other says slightly more, and both are in the same table on the same page.

The reason is arithmetic, ours on the company’s figures. The thirteenth week carried $5,047m less $4,730m, which is $317 million of gross profit on $1,138 million of revenue, a gross margin of 27.9%, against 31.0% for the other twelve weeks. A margin is period-neutral only if the extra period runs at the same margin as the rest. This one ran roughly three percentage points below, so adding it pulled the whole quarter’s reported margin down past the prior year, while the twelve weeks that are genuinely comparable had moved up.

No amount of dividing by weeks recovers that. Dividing revenue by thirteen and gross profit by thirteen leaves the ratio where it was, so the crude fix repairs the levels and silently leaves the margin wrong. The only repair removes the extra week from both the numerator and the denominator, and either the company provides one or you cannot build it from the published totals. The company reads its own quarter that way: in its fourth-quarter discussion on page 33 it states that on a comparable 12-week basis “revenue increased 3.5%, gross profit percentage improved by 10 basis points”. The same pattern runs through the full year, from the table on page 68, where gross margin was flat at 31.3% as reported and up 10 basis points to 31.4% on the comparable 52-week basis, with revenue up 6.3% reported and 4.4% comparable.

Depreciation and amortisation is the only line in the fourth-quarter table identical in both columns, $613 million either way, and what follows is worth a minute. Operating income on the thirteen-week basis exceeds its comparable figure by $106 million, and adjusted EBITDA exceeds its comparable figure by the same $106 million, on our arithmetic on the company’s printed table. The two gaps match because depreciation did not move, which means the comparable column carries thirteen weeks of depreciation against twelve weeks of revenue. So the direction of the approximation is knowable and it runs against the company: its own 29.6% comparable operating income growth is, if anything, understated. That is what the word approximate looks like from the outside, with its lean knowable.

The general lesson travels well beyond retail calendars: any ratio built from two periods inherits whatever is different about those periods. If you are not yet comfortable with how margins, returns and coverage ratios are constructed, our guide to financial ratios explained builds them one at a time.

Everything beyond those seven mandated figures and the item 1.10 narrative, including fourth-quarter margins, segments and cash flow, you build yourself: take the full-year figure and subtract the year-to-date figure that covers the first three quarters.

Work it on revenue, using the eight-quarter table above, and this guide’s own subject arrives in a new place. Loblaw’s first three quarters of 2025 ran 12, 12 and 16 weeks, so the year to date at the end of the third quarter is 40 weeks, not 36. Those three quarters are $13,904m, $14,457m and $19,160m, summing to $47,521m. The full year is $63,903m, and $63,903m less $47,521m is $16,382m, exactly the fourth quarter the table prints. The method reproduces a published figure, which is how you know it works. The remainder is 53 weeks less 40, so 13 weeks, and it carries the extra week: a reader who assumed a twelve-week fourth quarter would divide by the wrong number.

Revenue is the easy case, because it is in that table already. In practice you run the subtraction off the year-to-date column of the third interim report, and the basis check from the restatement flags above is the first step, because the year-to-date column and the annual figure have to be on the same basis before the subtraction means anything. The reason to learn it is the lines the table does not carry. For margins, segments and cash flow that year-to-date column is the only source, the answer is your arithmetic rather than a filed figure, and nobody has audited it. When you are comparing large, long-established Canadian companies of the kind in our Canadian blue chip stocks coverage, the quality of voluntary disclosure is itself one of the things you are comparing.

The number that decides the question lives in a note

The second structural feature of this document set is that the figure you want is frequently in a note, and notes are not appendices. They are where the labels on the statements are defined.

Loblaw’s consolidated balance sheets, page 85, carry a line called “Trade payables and other liabilities”, cross-referenced to note 18. The line stood at $7,127 million at January 3, 2026 against $7,531 million at December 28, 2024, down 5.4% by our arithmetic. A reader who stops there records that the company owed slightly less than the year before, and moves on.

Note 18, on page 119, is titled “Supplier Financing Arrangements”. It states, in part:

In 2024, the Company started a supplier financing program with a third-party financial institution that provides financing to suppliers. This arrangement allows these suppliers to elect to be paid by the financial institution at a discount earlier than the maturity date of the receivable which generally ranges between 30 and 60 days. … The amount outstanding under this program as at January 3, 2026 was $242 million (December 28, 2024 – $52 million) and is presented within trade payables and other liabilities. Of this amount, suppliers have received payment of $187 million (December 28, 2024 – $44 million) from the financial institution under the program. The activity related to this program is classified as an operating activity within the consolidated statements of cash flows.

	December 28, 2024	January 3, 2026
Supplier financing outstanding	$52m	$242m
Of which suppliers have already been paid by the financial institution	$44m	$187m
Trade payables and other liabilities	$7,531m	$7,127m
Financed share of that line, our arithmetic	0.69%	3.40%

The balance-sheet line went down 5.4% while the slice of it running through the program rose to 4.7 times its prior level by our arithmetic. Neither movement appears on the income statement, and neither appears as a line in the cash flow statement, where the note tells you the activity sits inside operating activities. The $242 million has no line and no subtotal of its own: the note says it is “presented within trade payables and other liabilities”, so it sits inside a statement total, counted but invisible as itself, disclosed in exactly one place.

Source: Loblaw Companies Limited 2025 Annual Report, note 18 Supplier Financing Arrangements, page 119, and the consolidated balance sheets, page 85. The financed share of the payables line is our arithmetic on the two figures.

Be careful what this does and does not mean. This is not borrowing by Loblaw and it is nothing like hidden: the company discloses the program in a note, cross-references it from the balance sheet, gives the amount and how much the financial institution has already advanced, says suppliers participate at their own discretion, and says where the cash flows are classified. The teaching point is narrower and more useful than a scandal. “Trade payables and other liabilities” is a label, not a fact. The note is where you find out who is actually owed, by when, and through what arrangement, and a single balance-sheet line can move in the opposite direction from the thing inside it that you would care about.

The auditor names the judgements of most significance

Item 1.12 is management telling you which figures in the accounts are judgements. The auditor’s report, bound in the same document as the notes, carries the other half of that conversation, and in a Canadian report the term for it is key audit matters. Loblaw’s report from PwC, printed page 79, defines them:

Key audit matters are those matters that, in our professional judgment, were of most significance in our audit of the consolidated financial statements for the 53-week year ended January 3, 2026. … we do not provide a separate opinion on these matters.

It names one: the assessment of impairment indicators for fixed assets and right-of-use assets for retail locations. The report refers the reader to four notes for it, among them note 3 Critical Accounting Estimates and Judgments, which is the statements’ side of exactly the material item 1.12 covers in the MD&A, so the cross-reference does the navigation for you. Then on page 80 the report says what the judgement produced: “$27 million of impairment losses on fixed assets and $19 million of impairment losses on right-of-use assets in respect of 18 retail location CGUs”. An independent list of the judgements that mattered most, pointed at the notes that hold them, with the outcome quantified.

Cameco’s report uses a different term. KPMG states that “we conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB”, the United States Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, and a report under those standards names critical audit matters instead, each one a matter that “(1) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the consolidated financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments”. That is a threshold rather than a ranking, and a report can carry more than one. Cameco’s names the assessment of recoverability of the deferred tax asset, pointing at note 20, where deferred tax assets of $666,457,000 sit at December 31, 2025, and identifying it “due to the high degree of judgment required”. Either way the drill is the same: read what the auditor singled out against item 1.12, management’s own list. Where the two land on the same figure, you have something worth attention from both sides; where they diverge, the divergence is the interesting part.

The AIF: ranked risks, and a lawsuit section with a price

The annual information form is not part of the glossy book, and it holds the material that is hardest to get anywhere else. Cameco Corporation’s 2025 annual information form, dated March 19, 2026 and filed as Exhibit 99.1 to its Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2025, is the example.

Three documents, three dates

Document	The date it carries
Audited consolidated financial statements, auditor’s report	February 12, 2026
Management’s discussion and analysis	February 13, 2026
Annual information form	March 19, 2026

Thirty-five days separate the audited statements from the AIF, and part of that is a rule. Form 51-102F2 item 1.1 requires that the date of the AIF “must be no earlier than the date of the auditor’s report” on the most recent audited financial statements, and adds that “You must file your AIF within 10 days of the date of the AIF”. It says nothing about the MD&A, so the AIF arriving last is customary rather than structural. Here it does arrive last, which makes it the most recent account of the business in Cameco’s annual cycle.

What it is current as of is a separate question, and Cameco answers it on page 3: “The information contained in this AIF is presented as at December 31, 2025, the last day of our most recently completed financial year, and is based on what we knew as of March 17, 2026, except as otherwise stated.” Two dates doing two jobs: the figures describe the year end, the knowledge runs to two days before the document’s own date. A reader who stops at the annual report has the company as management saw it in mid-February, and the AIF moves that forward by a month.

The risk factors are ranked by rule

Form 51-102F2 item 5.2, from the Ontario Securities Commission’s unofficial consolidation of Form 51-102F2, with its instructions:

5.2 Disclose risk factors relating to your company and its business, such as cash flow and liquidity problems, if any, experience of management, the general risks inherent in the business carried on by your company … and any other matter that would be most likely to influence an investor’s decision to purchase securities of your company. If there is a risk that securityholders of your company may become liable to make an additional contribution beyond the price of the security, disclose that risk. INSTRUCTIONS (i) Disclose the risks in order of seriousness from the most serious to the least serious. (ii) A risk factor must not be de-emphasized by including excessive caveats or conditions.

The order is regulated. A risk section is not an alphabetical list and it is not meant to be arranged for comfort: instruction (i) requires descending seriousness and instruction (ii) bars burying an item under qualifications, so reading from the top is reading the company’s own ranking of what could go wrong.

Cameco’s AIF runs to 158 pages. Its section “Risks that can affect our business” begins on page 114 and runs to page 141, with four groups in this order: strategic from page 115, financial from page 120, regulatory and governance from page 126, and operational from page 133. The section’s own framing, on page 115: “The following section describes the risks that are most material to our business.”

The first entry in the first group is headed “Major nuclear incident risk”. Not the uranium price. Not Kazakhstan. Not contracting terms. The text names the Chernobyl accident of 1986 and the 2011 accident at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan, and says of the latter that its effect on the uranium market “has had a material and adverse effect on our earnings, cash flows, financial condition, results of operations, and prospects”. The second entry under strategic risks is that public acceptance of nuclear energy is uncertain.

Stated precisely, because precision matters here. Cameco groups its risks into four broad categories, and of the grouping it says that “the way we define these categories and the risks within them may change over time as our business and operating environment evolves”. So what sits at the top of a group is the most serious of that group. And the first thing this document puts in front of a reader is the possibility of a major nuclear accident anywhere in the world. For a company that mines uranium rather than operating reactors, that placement tells you where management believes the real exposure sits, and it is not a view you would arrive at by watching the uranium price.

Do this on any AIF built on Form 51-102F2, which is the ordinary Canadian case. The ordering is cheap to check, and it is the company’s own ranking rather than a commentator’s.

Legal proceedings, and the ten per cent floor

Item 12.1 of Form 51-102F2 requires a company to describe any legal proceedings it or its property was a party to or the subject of during the financial year, and any it knows to be contemplated, and for each one to give the court or agency, the date instituted, the principal parties, the nature of the claim, the amount claimed, whether the proceeding is being contested, and its present status.

Cameco’s “Legal proceedings” section, near the end of a 158-page document, is two sentences:

We are currently involved in a dispute with CRA. See Transfer pricing dispute at page 109 for more details about this dispute.

That is the entire item. A reader could reasonably conclude from its length that very little is going on, and would be wrong on both counts: the cross-referenced discussion at pages 109 to 111 is substantial, and the brevity is a matter of rules rather than of volume.

Take the cross-reference first. Transfer pricing is the set of prices at which companies inside one corporate group sell to each other, which determines how much of the group’s profit is taxed in which country. By Cameco’s account in its AIF: the Canada Revenue Agency has disputed the company’s marketing and trading structure and its transfer pricing since 2008; the Tax Court of Canada ruled for Cameco in September 2018 on the 2003, 2005 and 2006 tax years; the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that on June 26, 2020; and the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the agency’s leave application on February 18, 2021. The remaining transfer pricing adjustment for 2007 to 2013 is $3.3 billion, reduced from $5.1 billion.

Now the rule behind the brevity, which is the part you can use on any company. The instruction to item 12.1:

You do not need to give information with respect to any proceeding that involves a claim for damages if the amount involved, exclusive of interest and costs, does not exceed ten per cent of the current assets of your company. However, if any proceeding presents in large degree the same legal and factual issues as other proceedings pending or known to be contemplated, you must include the amount involved in the other proceedings in computing the percentage.

There is a disclosure floor for damages claims, it is a percentage, and the percentage is of a figure printed on the balance sheet. Current assets are the assets a company expects to turn into cash within a year: cash, short-term investments, receivables, inventories and the like. So you can compute the floor yourself, for any issuer, in one division.

Issuer	Total current assets	Ten per cent, the disclosure floor for a damages claim, our arithmetic
Cameco, December 31, 2025	$2,639.2m	$263.9m
Loblaw, January 3, 2026	$14,928m	$1,492.8m

Cameco’s balance sheet reports in thousands, showing total current assets of $2,639,215 thousand at December 31, 2025. Loblaw’s figure is from the consolidated balance sheets on page 85.

A damages claim against Loblaw of a billion dollars does not, on its own, have to be described in that company’s AIF. Against Cameco the figure is $263.9 million. The ratio between the two floors is 5.66 times, a function of balance-sheet size rather than of litigiousness: two companies can carry identical litigation and disclose it differently, entirely lawfully, because one is bigger.

Two qualifications. The exemption covers claims for damages, exclusive of interest and costs, so it is not general permission to omit litigation, and it does not touch item 12.2 Regulatory Actions, which deals with penalties, sanctions and settlement agreements. And the instruction aggregates: where a proceeding presents in large degree the same legal and factual issues as others pending or known to be contemplated, those amounts go into the percentage, so a cluster of similar small claims is measured together.

The right inference from a two-sentence legal proceedings item is therefore not “a quiet year”. It is “nothing above this company’s floor, measured the way the instruction measures it, plus whatever the company chose to add”.

The AIF items with no counterpart in the glossy book

Two of these matter enormously for the resource companies that make up a large share of the Canadian market. Item 5.4 Companies With Mineral Projects and item 5.5 Companies with Oil and Gas Activities put mineral-project and reserve disclosure inside the AIF, cross-referenced for mineral projects to National Instrument 43-101, the rule governing technical disclosure about mineral properties. Cameco’s AIF carries its mineral reserves and resources at page 95.

Item 5.4 also points past itself. Its very first requirement, item 5.4(1) on page 12, is “the title, author(s), and date of the most recent technical report on the property filed in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects”. The technical report is where the reserve estimate is made and signed by a qualified person; the AIF summarises it and tells you which one to read. Where a miner files an AIF, that is where the reserve summary and the pointer live, and the annual report is neither. Where it does not file one, as a TSX Venture or CSE-listed explorer need not, the disclosure is somewhere else and you have to find where. If you follow the names in our Canadian mining stocks coverage, check the listing first, because it decides which filing you are looking for.

The AIF’s other distinctive items are worth knowing by name: item 4.1 Three Year History, item 6.1 Dividends and Distributions, item 7.3 Ratings, item 8.1 Trading Price and Volume, item 10.2 Cease Trade Orders, Bankruptcies, Penalties or Sanctions, item 15.1 Material Contracts, the audit committee information required by Form 52-110F1, and item 18.1, which moves the compensation disclosure into the AIF in the case below. Item 10.2 is the one people are most surprised by: it reaches the personal regulatory history of directors and officers.

Item 6.1 requires three years of dividends and distributions, the raw material for working out what a holding actually pays rather than what a quoted yield implies, and our dividend income calculator turns a per-share history and a position size into an income figure.

Executive pay is in a different document, filed later

Executive compensation is not in the annual report and not in the MD&A. In the normal case it is not in the AIF either: it is in the management information circular, and the rule that puts it there is conditional. NI 51-102 section 9.3.1, page 60, opens “Subject to Item 8 of Form 51-102F5, if a reporting issuer is required to send an information circular to a securityholder under paragraph 9.1(2)(a)”, and then requires the disclosure to be provided in accordance with Form 51-102F6 Statement of Executive Compensation. It must cover how decisions about the compensation of named executive officers and directors are made, the compensation actually paid to each of them, and how that relates to the overall stewardship and governance of the issuer. Section 9.3.1(2.1) lets a venture issuer use the shorter Form 51-102F6V instead, at its option, and the deadline in section 9.3.1(2.2) is 140 days after the financial year end, or 180 days for a venture issuer whichever form it uses.

The AIF is required to tell you where that disclosure went, which is the second reason to open it. Item 17.1(2), page 25, makes a company that must distribute a Form 51-102F5 to any of its securityholders include in its AIF “a statement that additional information, including directors’ and officers’ remuneration and indebtedness … is contained in your company’s information circular for its most recent annual meeting of securityholders that involved the election of directors.”

Now follow the condition in section 9.3.1 to the case where it fails, because the pay disclosure does not disappear with the circular, it moves. Item 18.1 of Form 51-102F2, page 26, applies “For companies that are not required to send a Form 51-102F5 to any of their securityholders” and requires the AIF to carry the Form 51-102F5 disclosure as modified in a table, whose modification against item 8 reads: “A company that does not send a management information circular to its securityholders must provide the disclosure required by Form 51-102F6.” So compensation is in the circular, and where no circular goes to any securityholder, it is in the AIF.

Between annual documents: changes, acquisitions and insider trades

Four filings exist to stop the annual set from going stale, and all four are fast.

A material change has two limbs in the definition at section 1.1, page 7. The first is a change in the business, operations or capital of the issuer that would reasonably be expected to have a significant effect on the market price or value of its securities. The second is “a decision to implement a change referred to in paragraph (a) made by the board of directors or other persons acting in a similar capacity or by senior management of the reporting issuer who believe that confirmation of the decision by the board of directors or any other persons acting in a similar capacity is probable”. So the decision itself can trigger the obligation before anything has happened in the business, but only where it is taken at board level, or by senior management who believe board confirmation is probable. On a material change, section 7.1(1), page 40, requires the issuer to “immediately issue and file a news release authorized by an executive officer” describing the nature and substance of the change, and then to file a Form 51-102F3 Material Change Report “as soon as practicable, and in any event within 10 days of the date on which the change occurs”. Section 7.1(2) permits a confidential filing instead where disclosure would be unduly detrimental to the issuer’s interests.

So the news release is the fast version and the material change report is the considered one, and the report frequently contains detail the release did not. For the mechanism connecting that disclosure to what happens next in the market, see our guide to what moves a stock price.

The auditor leaving runs on three clocks. Section 4.11(5), printed pages 29 and 30, gives a company 3 days from the termination or resignation to prepare a change of auditor notice, deliver it to the departing auditor, and ask that auditor to review it and write to the regulator saying, for each statement in the notice, whether it agrees, disagrees and why, or has no basis to agree or disagree. The letter is due back within 7 days. Within 14 days the audit committee or the board approves the notice, the reporting package goes to the regulator and the predecessor auditor, and any reportable event gets a news release, issued and filed. So an auditor leaving becomes public inside two weeks, with both sides’ accounts attached wherever the departing auditor writes back: the rule requires the company to ask for that letter, and the reporting package carries it only if it is received.

Acquisitions get a filing of their own. Section 8.2, pages 41-42, requires a reporting issuer that completes a significant acquisition, as determined under section 8.3, to file a business acquisition report, usually within 75 days of the acquisition date. The report carries financial statements of the business that was bought, the one place in the set you will see the target’s own numbers rather than the buyer’s description of them.

Insider trades run on their own rule. NI 55-104 section 3.3, page 9, requires a reporting insider to file an insider report within five days of a change in beneficial ownership of, or control or direction over, securities of the issuer. The clock runs from the change in beneficial ownership or control, not from a trade. Section 3.4, page 10, spells out for greater certainty the case that catches people out: a reporting insider who exercises an option, warrant or other convertible or exchangeable security files within five days of the exercise. Those filings go to SEDI, not to any document in the annual set, and they are where you look to see what the people running the company did with their own money.

Where these documents actually live

Two destinations hold the whole set: SEDAR+ for the regulated filings, and SEDI for the insider reports.

What you look up on SEDAR+ is a filing type, and the types are the names this guide has already taught: annual information form, management information circular, material change report, business acquisition report, certification of annual filings, and the annual financial statements and MD&A. Knowing the name is most of the work, and “annual report” is not one of those names.

For a cross-listed company there is a second route, frequently the faster one. The same material is filed with the SEC as exhibits to a Form 40-F, and the exhibits are numbered. Cameco’s Form 40-F for the year ended December 31, 2025, accession 0001193125-26-116229, carries the annual information form as Exhibit 99.1, the audited consolidated financial statements as Exhibit 99.2, and the MD&A as Exhibit 99.3. That is where the Cameco material in this guide came from: three documents at three stable URLs inside one filing, with the exhibit numbers telling you which is which.

Either way the move is the same: decide which document holds what you want, then get it by name rather than hoping it was bound into the book.

The mistake that costs the most

One error does more damage than the rest: reading a growth rate without checking how long the two periods were.

Loblaw’s fourth quarter of 2025 grew revenue 11.3% and operating income 43.0% against periods one week shorter. On the company’s own comparable basis the figures were 3.5% and 29.6%. A reader who banked the 43% carried a 13.4 percentage point error, and it does not stay put: it reverses the following year, when the thirteenth week drops out of the comparative and growth looks terrible for no business reason at all.

The others, shorter:

• Treating a margin as immune to period length. Loblaw’s fourth-quarter gross margin fell 10 basis points as reported and rose 10 on the comparable basis.
• Quoting a measure without checking whether it is on a statement. Gross profit, gross profit percentage, adjusted EBITDA and adjusted diluted earnings per share are all non-GAAP measures of Loblaw’s own, each carrying an endnote to the reconciliation in Section 16 of its MD&A.
• Reading the statements and skipping the notes. Loblaw’s note 18 is where the label and the fact part company.

Where to find it

One table, because the usual question is which document to open.

What you want	Where it is	Item or section	How late it can arrive
Three years of revenue, earnings, assets and dividends per share	Annual MD&A	item 1.3	90 days, 120 for a venture issuer
Eight quarters side by side	Annual MD&A	item 1.5	90 days, then refiled every quarter
The fourth quarter	Annual MD&A	last column of item 1.5, narrative at item 1.10	90 days
Fourth-quarter margins, segments and cash flow	Nothing requires them: your own subtraction	full year less the third interim report’s year-to-date	after the annual statements
Critical accounting estimates	Annual MD&A	item 1.12, non-venture issuers only	90 days
The judgements the auditor singled out	Auditor’s report, with the audited statements	key audit matters, or critical audit matters under United States standards	90 days
Ranked risk factors	AIF	item 5.2 and instructions (i) and (ii)	90 days, and no AIF is required of a venture issuer
Legal proceedings	AIF	item 12.1 and its instruction	90 days
Regulatory actions, penalties, sanctions, settlements	AIF	item 12.2	90 days
Material contracts	AIF for the particulars, SEDAR+ for the contract itself	item 15.1, and NI 51-102 s.12.2	90 days
Mineral and oil and gas reserves	AIF	items 5.4 and 5.5	90 days
Credit ratings	AIF	item 7.3	90 days
Director and officer cease trade orders and bankruptcies	AIF	item 10.2	90 days
Three years of dividends and distributions	AIF	item 6.1	90 days
Audit committee disclosure	AIF	Form 52-110F1	90 days
Executive compensation	Circular, or the AIF where no circular goes to any securityholder	Form 51-102F6, via Form 51-102F5 item 8 or Form 51-102F2 item 18.1	140 days, 180 for a venture issuer
That the auditor changed, and why	Change of auditor notice and reporting package	NI 51-102 s.4.11	3, 7 and 14 days from the event
What changed since the year end	Material change report	s.7.1, Form 51-102F3	news release immediately, report within 10 days
A target company’s own audited numbers	Business acquisition report	s.8.2, Form 51-102F4	usually 75 days
What the insiders bought and sold	Insider report on SEDI	NI 55-104 s.3.3	five days

A reading routine

Seven steps, in order.

1. Read the week counts in the eight-quarter table’s column headings before any growth rate, then the fourth-quarter discussion. Period lengths decide whether a comparison means what it appears to mean.
2. Read item 1.3’s three-year selected annual information before any commentary. Six specified items over three years, chosen by the form rather than the company, and read the continuing-operations line against the one above it.
3. Open the note behind every balance-sheet line you cannot define out loud. The statements carry labels, the notes carry what the labels contain.
4. Read item 1.12 critical accounting estimates, then the auditor’s report beside it. Item 1.12 is management naming which figures are judgements; key audit matters, or critical audit matters under United States standards, are the independent version with the note references attached. Together they are the shortest route to where the accounts could be wrong in good faith.
5. Open the AIF as a separate document and read the risk factors from the top, in order. The sequence is regulated, so the sequence is evidence.
6. Compute ten per cent of current assets before you conclude anything from the length of the legal proceedings and regulatory actions items.
7. Open the circular for compensation, and SEDI for what the insiders did with their own money. Neither is in the annual report, and both are about incentives rather than results.

That routine compounds, because the skill transfers to the next filing you open. What it produces is a clean set of figures on a comparable basis, the input to the next layer: our guide to how to analyse a company’s financials turns those figures into a judgement about the business.

Frequently asked questions

Is the glossy annual report worth reading at all? Yes, but for what it is. It normally contains two of the regulated documents, the MD&A and the audited financial statements with their notes, which between them hold the eight-quarter table, the fourth-quarter discussion, the critical accounting estimates, the auditor’s report and every note. That is most of the numerical substance. What it will not contain is the AIF or the compensation disclosure, so treat it as part of a reading list rather than the whole of one.

A company’s legal proceedings section is two lines. Does that mean nothing is happening? It means nothing is above that company’s floor as the instruction measures it. The floor is ten per cent of current assets for a damages claim, exclusive of interest and costs, and similar proceedings are aggregated before the test is applied. Item 12.2 Regulatory Actions is a separate item with no such threshold. So check item 12.2 and compute the floor before reading anything into brevity.

Does the company have to put numbers on its critical accounting estimates? The item requires an analysis, and the form pushes towards quantification. Instruction (ii) to item 1.12 says a company should provide quantitative disclosure when quantitative information is reasonably available and would provide material information for investors, and gives as examples a sensitivity analysis, or the upper and lower ends of the range of estimates from which the recorded estimate was selected. Where a company does give a range, it is telling you how much the reported figure could legitimately have differed, which is more useful than the estimate itself.

Where this leaves you

The annual report is a wrapper. The disclosure set is the thing, it arrives in pieces on clocks that do not line up, and the piece that answers your question may well be one the company never bound into the book.

Read the week counts before the growth rates, the notes before the totals, and the AIF before you decide you know what a company is exposed to. The documents are public, and the skill is cheaper to acquire than it looks. For companies to practise on, start with the names in our Canadian stocks coverage.

About the figures and the companies on this page. Loblaw Companies Limited and Cameco Corporation appear here as teaching material, and nothing above is a view on either company’s shares. Every figure is as reported in the filing named beside it. Securities rules change, so the regulators’ own consolidations of National Instrument 51-102 and its forms are the authority for any rule quoted here, and a company’s own filings are the authority for its figures.