Methodology
Using the site
- Search for a ticker or company name you're considering. If we have a report on it, read it and study it.
- Treat our reports only as a tool — for deeper insight, and as a launchpad for your own independent analysis.
- Our reports can be wrong. Use them freely in your pursuit of better investing, but check carefully for mistakes. Judge for yourself, over time, how accurate our predictions actually are. If you find our analysis low-quality or our predictions inaccurate, we'd rather you stop reading them.
- Read a report in order — Steps 1 through 10 — instead of jumping straight to the conclusion. As you read, rebuild the case in your own mind with your own reasoning and background knowledge.
- The conclusion is secondary. A report's real value is in its reasoning, not in the Rating or Target Price — so don't just skim the figures.
A note on tone. We aim for reports anyone can read easily, so the writing is sometimes informal, conversational, opinionated, or simplified. That's a deliberate choice for readability — read it in that spirit.
About the reports
We've deliberately kept this section high-level: enough for you to use our reports well, without giving away how they're built.
Two company types (A / B). The same yardstick can't fairly measure a mature company with stable revenue but stalled growth and a young company that just launched and is growing fast. The former is classified as Type A, the latter as Type B. Classification follows our own criteria, weighing factors such as growth trajectory, market size, and valuation.
Investment thesis & tags. Beyond the company type, each report carries an investment thesis (the core angle behind the opportunity) and one or more tags (the broader themes it touches). These let you jump from one report to related ones across the site. As with everything else, the specific classification follows our own judgment.
Reference time (ET). All dates and times in our reports are in U.S. Eastern Time (ET) — the time zone of the U.S. exchanges where these stocks trade — never your local time. Each report carries a publication date (when we released it) and reflects market data as of a stated date; both are in ET, and the two can differ by a day or so depending on when the analysis was produced relative to the latest trading session.
Scoring. Investment scores are out of 100.
| Score | Rating | Opinion |
|---|---|---|
| 95–100 | S ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Strong Buy |
| 85–94 | A ⭐⭐⭐⭐ | Buy |
| 75–84 | B ⭐⭐⭐ | Hold |
| 55–74 | C ⭐⭐ | Sell |
| 45–54 | D ⭐ | Strong Sell |
| 0–44 | F ⛔ | Avoid |
These ratings are our general, systematic opinion — not personalized advice, and not a guarantee.
Rating distribution. Each report is graded on its own merits. Our ratings are absolute — not graded on a curve — and we set no quota for how many Buys or Sells appear. A grade reflects the individual company's case, never its rank against the others we cover.
Because our coverage isn't a perfectly random sample of the market, the overall mix of ratings can lean positive or negative at any given time. A stretch of high or low grades reflects which companies we chose to analyze — not an editorial bias toward optimism or pessimism.
Part of that is a deliberate quality filter: we generally don't spend analysis on names that aren't real investment candidates to begin with — penny stocks and other tickers with no genuine business behind them. That's a filter on what's worth your time to read, not on what will score well; the companies we do cover still earn honest Sell ratings when they deserve them.
No Action Plan for C or below (Sell or weaker). When the rating is C or lower — i.e., a Sell opinion or weaker — we do not provide an Action Plan (target price, buy zone, etc.). Issuing a sell opinion while also setting a target price would be self-contradictory.
Buy zones above the current price. For undervalued names in particular, the appropriate buy price can sometimes be higher than the current price. This is not an error.
A target price below the current price (negative Expected Return). For richly valued names, our fair-value target can come out below the current share price — so the Expected Return shows a negative number. This is not an error. It reflects a company whose business quality may be strong while its current share price has run well ahead of its fundamentals. In these cases the rating and the target price describe two different things: the grade speaks to company quality, and the target price speaks to today's entry valuation.