The recipe in one line
The Bull Rankings score is a quality-growth screen — the classic GARP idea, growth at a reasonable price:
Score = a 0–100 blend of three pillars — Quality, Growth, and Value
Each pillar is graded from a company's published fundamentals, scored against its sector peers, and combined into a single number. It is a blended combination, not a simple sum: a name has to be decent on all three legs, because a glaring weakness on any one pillar pulls the whole score down. A cheap, growing business with terrible returns on capital doesn't score well; neither does a high-quality compounder priced for perfection.
No machine learning, no analyst input. Every step is auditable from the row card: click any ticker on the rankings page and the breakdown shows the three pillars and the grades beneath them.
The three pillars
- Quality — durable returns on capital, healthy margins, low leverage, and clean, cash-backed earnings. Is this a genuinely good business, or one leaning on debt and accounting?
- Growth — revenue and earnings expansion. Is the business actually getting bigger?
- Value — valuation versus sector peers: the PEG ratio, earnings and cash-flow multiples. Are you paying a fair price for that quality and growth, or chasing it?
"Growth at a reasonable price" is the whole idea: the strongest score goes to a strong, growing business you can still buy at a sensible valuation.
The grade card beneath the score
The pillars are built from a panel of underlying fundamentals, each letter-graded A through F. Five surface on every row card; the rest live in the breakdown tooltip and the compare-page deep dive:
Primary (shown on the row card):
- FCF (free cash flow) — How much cash the business produces after capex. See: Understanding free cash flow.
- Rev (revenue growth) — TTM YoY top-line growth. See: Understanding revenue growth.
- D/E (debt-to-equity) — Total balance-sheet leverage. See: Understanding debt-to-equity.
- P/E or P/S (valuation multiple) — P/E for profitable names, P/S for pre-profit names. See: P/E vs P/S: when to use which.
- PEG (growth-adjusted P/E) — The Lynch ratio. See: Understanding the PEG ratio.
Supplemental (in the breakdown tooltip):
- FCF Yield — FCF divided by market cap. See: Understanding free cash flow yield.
- ROE (return on equity) — Capital efficiency. See: Understanding return on equity.
How a grade becomes a number
Each metric grade maps to points on a fixed table:
| Grade | Points |
|---|---|
| A | 100 |
| A- | 92 |
| B+ | 85 |
| B | 80 |
| B- | 72 |
| C+ | 68 |
| C | 60 |
| C- | 52 |
| D+ | 48 |
| D | 40 |
| F | 20 |
Those grades are scored relative to sector — a debt level that's healthy for a utility would be alarming for a software company, and a P/E that's cheap for tech would be expensive for a bank — so each name is judged against the right peers, then rolled into its three pillars and the 0–100 headline.
Sector-aware exceptions
A few sectors need special handling because the standard grade card doesn't apply:
- Banks, insurers, REITs: free cash flow, debt-to-equity, and PEG all break down for balance-sheet businesses (operating cash flow obscured by loans/deposits, structural leverage, sparse forward-EPS coverage). These names aren't given a quality-growth score at all — they're graded on a sector-appropriate card (price-to-book, dividend yield, payout, cash-flow coverage) and tagged Bank · REIT.
- Mining (gold, silver, copper): highly cyclical earnings make PEG and growth erratic at cycle extremes, so the model caps the credit a cyclical trough or peak can earn rather than letting a single distorted quarter swing the score.
Why one score
The site runs one quality-growth score on every surface — the homepage, the screener, each stock page, compare, and the watchlist all show the same number for the same ticker. There is no separate "growth score" or "value score" to reconcile, and no per-name bucket label: a single 0–100 figure, with the three pillars right beneath it so you can see whether a name earned it on quality, on growth, on price, or on all three.
Bottom line
Every score is a blend of three sector-relative pillars, every input is auditable, and every grade is reproducible from the underlying financial statements. That's the entire pitch: the rankings page should be a reasonable starting point for someone who wants to do their own work, not a black box that asks you to trust it. Click any pick and watch the math.