Free Dilution Research Tools: How to Check a Small Cap for $0

Researching a small cap's dilution costs nothing if you are willing to read. The filings are public, SEC EDGAR is free, and every number a paid tracker shows you came out of a 10-Q, a 424B5, an 8-K or a proxy you can open yourself.

A tracker sells you time: someone else reads the filings, totals the warrants and keeps the numbers current. At one or two tickers a week, doing it yourself is practical. The workflow:

1. Find the financings with EDGAR full-text search.
2. Read the latest 10-Q for shares outstanding, cash and burn.
3. Total the overhang from the 424B5 and 8-K.
4. Run the numbers through free calculators.
5. Use the trackers' free plans for a second opinion.

Then we run it on a real Nasdaq company, citing every figure to an accession number.

EDGAR full-text search covers the text of filings and exhibits since 2001. Unquoted words are all required, quotes make a phrase, OR (capitalised) matches either term and a leading hyphen excludes a word. The EDGAR search guide has the full syntax. To limit any search to one issuer, type a company name or CIK into the entity box, and set the form filter where shown.

efts.sec.gov

Enlarge

Two habits save time. Search both spellings when a phrase is hyphenated in some filings and not others ("at the market" and "at-the-market"). And count distinct accession numbers, not result rows: full-text search returns one hit per matching document, so a filing whose main document and exhibit both match appears twice.

Open the company's filing list at https://www.sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?action=getcompany&CIK=<cik>&type=10-Q and take the most recent quarterly report. Most of what you need is in three places (what to read first in a 10-Q):

• The cover page. The line "As of [date] the registrant had N shares of common stock outstanding" is the latest share count, usually dated a few weeks after quarter end.
• The balance sheet. Cash and cash equivalents plus short-term marketable securities is your liquid cash.
• The cash flow statement. Net cash used in operating activities, divided by the months in the period, is your monthly burn. Add capital expenditures if they are material.

After that, read the liquidity note (often Note 2) for a going concern paragraph, and the equity note for the warrant and option tables. Those tables are where overhang starts. Anything issued after quarter end has to come from later 8-Ks and prospectus supplements.

For each financing since the 10-Q, the 424B5 gives the shares and pre-funded warrants sold, the offering price and the "shares outstanding immediately before and after" lines. The matching 8-K under Item 1.01 fills in what the prospectus leaves out: unregistered warrants from a concurrent private placement, placement agent warrants, and conditions such as shareholder approval.

Write the overhang down as a list, one row per instrument, with share count, exercise price and the accession number you read it from. That list is what a paid tracker's warrant tab is. Build one by hand once and you will know how to check theirs.

Lantern Pharma, a Nasdaq Capital Market biotech, closed a registered direct offering on September 30, 2026. Here is the free workflow run on it, EDGAR only. All figures are as filed; nothing below is a view on the stock.

The deal

The 424B5 (accession 0001493152-26-045049, filed 2026-09-30) offers 1,469,725 shares at $1.09 and pre-funded warrants for 2,200,000 shares, for total offering proceeds of $3,999,780.25. The 8-K (0001493152-26-045100) adds two warrant series the prospectus did not register:

The purchase warrants can't be exercised until stockholders approve them, and the company agreed to seek that approval within 90 days. The preliminary proxy filed on 2026-10-08 (0001493152-26-046325) puts it up as Proposal 4, and Proposal 2 asks to raise authorized common stock from 25,000,000 to 50,000,000.

The share count

The 424B5 states 13,465,851 shares outstanding before the offering and 17,135,576 after, assuming the pre-funded warrants are exercised. Pre-funded warrants at $0.0001 usually get counted as shares already, since exercising them costs next to nothing.

The 10-Q (0001493152-26-037971) lists older warrants still outstanding, 2,135,923 at $2.27 and 106,796 at $2.575, plus 1,479,398 options at June 30, 2026. Add those to the post-offering total and the new warrants and you get roughly 24.7 million shares on a fully counted basis, against 25,000,000 authorized. Read the authorized-share proposal with that in mind; the authorization increases guide explains the mechanics.

The baby shelf math

The 424B5 also discloses the baby shelf calculation under General Instruction I.B.6 of Form S-3: a public float of $33,121,325 (11,580,883 non-affiliate shares at $2.86, the August 7, 2026 sale price) and $5,533,739 already sold under I.B.6 in the prior 12 calendar months.

The filing doesn't state the remaining figure; that last line is ours. It assumes the $5,533,739 excludes this offering, which fits the 10-Q's description of a May 2026 registered direct with gross proceeds of about $4,400,000. The cap is also recalculated at each sale from a recent price, so it moves with the stock. You can test both assumptions in the baby shelf calculator.

signal8.ai

Enlarge

Cash and runway

From the 10-Q balance sheet at June 30, 2026: cash and equivalents of $6,660,170 plus marketable securities of $701,085, or $7,361,255 liquid. Operating cash used over six months was $6,713,540, about $1,118,923 a month. That works out to about 6.6 months of cash at June 30, before the September raise.

Roll forward three months of burn and add the roughly $3.60 million of estimated net proceeds the 424B5 gives:

That is an estimate with stated inputs, not a forecast. It ignores any ATM sales after June 30, and the 10-Q itself states substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern. The cash runway calculator lets you change each input, and the cash runway guide covers the adjustments.

signal8.ai

Enlarge

Listing status

One more full-text search, "Listing Rule 5550" on 8-Ks for this company, turns up an Item 3.01 filing on 2026-10-01 (0001493152-26-045344): a Nasdaq notice dated September 25, 2026 of non-compliance with Listing Rule 5550(b)(2), the market value of listed securities standard. The Nasdaq deficiency notices guide explains the compliance periods.

All of that takes roughly an hour the first time, and much less once you know where each number lives.

The Signal8 Academy has four free calculators, listed at signal8.ai/learn/tools, and none needs an account. Every input is saved in the link, so you can share a scenario exactly as you set it up, and each one writes out its formulas under the result.

signal8.ai

Enlarge

• The baby shelf calculator gives public float, whether the I.B.6 limit applies, the one-third cap and remaining capacity after trailing 12-month sales.
• The cash runway calculator turns 10-Q figures into months of runway, adjusted for time elapsed and later raises.
• The convertible conversion calculator walks a convertible note round by round, with fixed or variable pricing, a VWAP lookback, a floor and an ownership blocker.
• The reverse split calculator handles post-split shares and price, fractional shares, authorized headroom and cumulative ratios.

Several trackers have a free tier. Here is what each includes, as listed on the vendor's own pricing page on 2026-10-12:

dilutionwatch.com

Enlarge

Plans change, so check the vendor's page before you rely on any line above. The best dilution trackers comparison goes through the paid tiers.

Doing it yourself costs something, and the free plans, Signal8's included, have real limits.

• Time and freshness. A hand-built overhang list is only as current as the last filing you read. The company can file a new 424B5 the next morning.
• Things filings make hard to see. ATM sales between quarters usually show up only in the next 10-Q, so a manual tally can lag. Warrant terms with resets or alternate cashless exercise need the full warrant exhibit, not the summary.
• Free tiers are previews. DilutionTracker's free plan marks its shelf data and risk rating as not included. Signal8's free account leaves out dilution snapshots, which are part of Signal8 Pro. If you want those tabulated for you across many tickers, that is what the paid plans sell.
• Screening. EDGAR can't filter by market cap, price or float. "Which sub-$50 million companies filed a 424B5 this week" needs company data next to the filings.

On the Signal8 side: the free SEC filings feed and company filings tabs help you find filings, and the must-raise screener is open to any signed-in account, but the cited, tabulated dilution data sits in the paid tier.