The one-paragraph version
The Bull Rankings model reads audited financial filings and live market prices for the US-listed universe, scores every company on a consistent set of fundamentals, and sorts the most attractive names into three buckets that suit three different ways of making money in stocks: Momentum Leaders, Value, and Turnarounds. It refreshes daily, it shows its work on every pick, and it tracks its own forward results in the open. It is not a tip service or a black box — it is a disciplined, repeatable process you can audit.
The data that goes in
A model is only as good as its inputs, so the foundation is clean fundamentals:
- Audited filings, reconciled. Financials are sourced from companies' SEC filings (EDGAR) rather than taken on faith from a single screen-scraped feed. Revenue, earnings, cash flow, debt, and share counts are reconciled so the numbers match what the company actually reported.
- Live prices. Valuation ratios and momentum are computed against current market prices, refreshed daily.
- A data-quality gate. Before any stock is scored, its fundamentals run through sanity checks — absurd values, stale reports, and missing-data cases are caught and handled rather than silently producing a garbage score.
Good data is unglamorous and it is most of the battle. A beautiful algorithm fed bad numbers produces confident nonsense.
The three buckets
No single style wins in every market, so the model runs three, each with its own logic:
- Momentum Leaders — durable, profitable, growing, cash-generative businesses ($2B+, double-digit ROE, sound balance sheet) ranked by 12-month price momentum. The premise: buy great companies whose stocks are already working. A diversification cap keeps the bucket from collapsing into one hot theme. See Quality momentum.
- Value — quality businesses trading below a reasonable estimate of intrinsic value, with a catalyst to close the gap. The premise: cheap cash generators mean-revert toward fair value. See Understanding value investing.
- Turnarounds — out-of-favor companies posting GAAP losses but still generating real cash — cyclical troughs and recovery plays, not lottery tickets. Position-size carefully. See Understanding turnaround investing.
How scoring works
Each stock is graded on a consistent panel of fundamentals — valuation (P/E, P/S, free-cash-flow yield), quality (return on equity, margins), growth (revenue), and balance-sheet health (debt-to-equity) — with sector-aware adjustments so a bank isn't judged by an industrial's yardstick. Those grades roll into a composite score that drives the Value and Turnaround rankings.
Momentum Leaders work a little differently: the ranking is pure 12-month price momentum (that's the validated edge), while the displayed score blends that momentum with the underlying quality so the number you see reflects "a strong business in a strong uptrend," not one without the other. Every score is decomposable — open the breakdown and you can see exactly which signals helped and which hurt.
The rules that keep us honest
This is where most ranking sites cut corners. We try not to:
- Forward track record, never back-dated. Every pick is logged at its pick-time price the moment it surfaces, then valued forward against the S&P 500 over the same window. The track record is what the model actually did in real time — not a back-test polished with hindsight.
- Back-tests carry their caveats out loud. Historical simulations suffer survivorship bias (you only test the names that still exist). We measure that bias rather than ignore it, and we publish forward results precisely because they don't have it.
- Tracked model vs. watchlists. Two extra shelves — Compounders (long-horizon quality) and Moonshots (speculation) — are clearly labeled as not part of the tracked model and do not appear in the track record. We don't blur the line between "this is the model" and "this is interesting."
- Not investment advice. The model is a research tool. It does not know your goals, your taxes, or your risk tolerance. Do your own work before you buy anything.
Bottom line
The model is deliberately simple to describe: clean fundamentals in, three time-tested styles applied with discipline, every score auditable, every pick tracked forward in the open. The edge isn't a secret formula — it's process, honest data, and the refusal to flatter the results. Start with the rankings, check the track record, and read the metric explainers if you want to see how each grade is built.