Want to find your lens? Five questions, no jargon — they tell you which of four reads fits how you already think.
Screens
Each of these is one plain rule, run across all 138 companies we cover, and the rule is printed on the page. Nothing here is a recommendation — a screen is a way of narrowing a list, and every name on it still has to be read.
The value lens
The two questions a value buyer asks in order: is there a margin of safety, and is the balance sheet strong enough that the wait is survivable. Cheap on its own is the easy half.
The rule. Fair value sits more than 15% above today's price, and the company holds more cash and marketable securities than it owes.
The value lens
Nothing here says a company is cheap or good. It says a bad year cannot be fatal, which is a different question and sometimes the only one that matters.
The rule. Cash and marketable securities exceed every borrowing — the company is in net cash, not net debt.
The income lens
Covered by the cash that funds it, and with a record of decisions behind it. A yield is not on this list — a high one is a claim to check, not a reason to be here.
The rule. The payout takes no more than 60% of free cash flow, and it was raised in almost every year of the decade on file and never cut.
The moat lens
The headline moat test, and consistency is the whole point of it: nine years above the bar is evidence of an edge, one is weather.
The rule. Return on invested capital held at or above 15% in at least 8 of the ten years on file.
The growth lens
The only forward-looking number on this site is the one the market is charging for. These are the companies where it is asking for less than the record already shows.
The rule. The growth rate today's price implies is lower than the per-share revenue growth the company has actually delivered over ten years.
These are free and they are ours — 5 rules we picked. Building your own filters is the Pro screener, and it is not written yet. What Pro is planned to be →
TickerMath is an educational tool, not investment advice — it computes one model from SEC filings and can be wrong. How we compute this →