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 one consistent quality-growth number, and surfaces the strongest names as the daily Top Picks. The score blends three things every durable investment needs — quality, growth, and a fair price — into a single 0–100 figure. 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 are computed against current market prices, refreshed daily, so a name's "fair price" leg reflects where it trades today.
- 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 pillars
The score is a quality-growth (GARP — "growth at a reasonable price") screen built from three pillars, each graded against sector-aware thresholds so a bank isn't judged by an industrial's yardstick:
- Quality — durable returns on capital, healthy margins, low leverage, and clean, cash-backed earnings. The premise: businesses that earn high returns and don't lean on debt compound for years.
- Growth — revenue and earnings expansion. A great business that isn't growing is a slow story; the model rewards real top- and bottom-line growth.
- Value — valuation versus sector peers: the PEG ratio, earnings and cash-flow multiples. The premise: paying a fair price for that quality and growth is what turns a good company into a good investment.
The three pillars combine into a single 0–100 score, so a high number means a strong, growing business trading at a fair price — not one leg without the others. Banks, insurers and REITs run on a different financial model, so they're graded on a sector-appropriate card rather than the quality-growth score.
How scoring works
Each pillar is graded from the underlying fundamentals — valuation (P/E, P/S, free-cash-flow yield, PEG), quality (return on equity, margins, leverage), and growth (revenue and earnings) — with sector-aware adjustments, then blended into the 0–100 headline. Every score is decomposable: open any pick and the three pillars (and the full grade card beneath them) show you 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 Top Picks 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, one quality-growth score out, every grade 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.