How to use these guides
The Bull Rankings model scores every US-listed stock on one transparent 0–100 quality-growth scale, then surfaces the best of them in the daily rankings and a forward-tested model portfolio. The point of these guides is to make that number legible: by the end you should be able to look at any stock's grade card and understand not just what it scored, but why.
If you are new, read them in order — start with how the model works, learn the individual fundamentals it grades, then move on to the investing strategies behind the quality-growth score. If you already know your way around a balance sheet, jump straight to whichever metric or strategy you want a refresher on.
Written by Bartholomew Chupka Jr.
These 16 are personal essays rather than reference guides — decisions made building this model, the evidence behind them, and the times the data said something unwelcome. Everything else on this page is an explainer written with AI assistance under our editorial standards; only these carry a personal byline.
Why FICO Stock Fell 46%: VantageScore, FHFA, and What the Numbers Miss
Regulators opened the mortgage market to FICO's cheaper rival twice in September, and the stock lost almost half its value. Its fundamentals still look excellent, and that is exactly the problem: the numbers that made FICO look strong are the ones now under threat, and they haven't changed yet.
What Is a Growth Stock Worth With the 10-Year Treasury at 5.2%?
The Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023 and the 10-year Treasury touched 5.2%. The standard answer is that growth stocks are worth less. The math behind that answer is real, but it rests on an assumption almost nobody states, and my own model had the rate wrong for five months.
Why heavy capex makes great businesses look expensive
Six mega caps spent $579 billion on property and equipment in twelve months. Capital spending lands straight on free cash flow, and free cash flow yield feeds the value pillar — so the screen marks them down for it, though less than you might expect. Whether that is a flaw depends on what you think a score is for.
I sold the dividend to buy the story
I sold my entire Johnson & Johnson position in late 2022 to fund speculative buys. JNJ has returned 63% since, dividends included. The speculative buys went to zero.
I don't rank banks. I tried hard to.
492 companies on this site get no Bull Rankings score at all. It isn't an oversight, and it isn't a view about banks — it's what happened after I spent a long time trying to force them in, built a workaround specifically to include them, and watched the data tell me to stop.
My backtest returned 54%. I published 41%.
I ran the same strategy against two data sources and got two very different answers. I published the lower one, then spent a paragraph arguing my remaining edge was smaller than it looked. Here's why — and why a 53% hit rate isn't the weakness it sounds like.
Why the DCF doesn't move my score
Most stock pages here carry a discounted cash flow estimate, and it has no say in the ranking at all. That isn't a lack of confidence in the math — it's what I think a DCF is actually good for, which is confirmation rather than valuation.
How the Bull Rankings model works
What goes into the score, and the rules I hold it to — a live forward record instead of a back-dated one, extra shelves kept off the scorecard, and a run that would rather publish nothing than publish something wrong.
The research behind the rankings: what I tested, kept, and threw out
The rejected ideas are the honest part of any model. Here are the signals I tested and threw out, the two that hurt to lose, and the times my own measuring tools turned out to be wrong.
How the Bull Rankings score works
One 0–100 number on every stock, built from three pillars, with a letter-graded card beside it. Including the part most models won't tell you: the three pillars look equally weighted, and measurably aren't.
How much of one stock is too much
I don't have a position-size limit. One name reached about 25% of my portfolio and I never trimmed it — here's why that's less reckless than it sounds.
The stock I got right — and the year my own screen would have thrown it away
I bought NVDA in 2022 on its growth record and have never sold a share. Run on the data it would have seen, my own model would have dropped it in 2023.
How I actually use these rankings
Do I use my own site? Yes — as a filter, not an oracle. How the Top 30, search and compare, and the theme pages fit into my own buying process.
How I decide when to sell — and why I usually don't
Two things make me exit a position outright. A third, far more common, makes me trim one — and the difference between them is where most selling mistakes come from.
The mistakes that cost me the most
A hype stock I lost over 75% on, a value trap I averaged down into, and years of buying dividends I didn't need — and what each one taught me.
Why I built my own stock screen
I didn't set out to build a ranking model — I set out to stop opening fourteen browser tabs every time I wanted an opinion about a company. Where the ideas came from, and how a manual process became an algorithm.
How the model works
Start here. What the Bull Rankings score actually measures, and how a whole market gets distilled into one transparent number.
I don't rank banks. I tried hard to.
492 companies on this site get no Bull Rankings score at all. It isn't an oversight, and it isn't a view about banks — it's what happened after I spent a long time trying to force them in, built a workaround specifically to include them, and watched the data tell me to stop.
My backtest returned 54%. I published 41%.
I ran the same strategy against two data sources and got two very different answers. I published the lower one, then spent a paragraph arguing my remaining edge was smaller than it looked. Here's why — and why a 53% hit rate isn't the weakness it sounds like.
How the Bull Rankings model works
What goes into the score, and the rules I hold it to — a live forward record instead of a back-dated one, extra shelves kept off the scorecard, and a run that would rather publish nothing than publish something wrong.
The research behind the rankings: what I tested, kept, and threw out
The rejected ideas are the honest part of any model. Here are the signals I tested and threw out, the two that hurt to lose, and the times my own measuring tools turned out to be wrong.
How the Bull Rankings score works
One 0–100 number on every stock, built from three pillars, with a letter-graded card beside it. Including the part most models won't tell you: the three pillars look equally weighted, and measurably aren't.
Why I built my own stock screen
I didn't set out to build a ranking model — I set out to stop opening fourteen browser tabs every time I wanted an opinion about a company. Where the ideas came from, and how a manual process became an algorithm.
Metrics & fundamentals
The building blocks. Each signal the score is built from — what it means, why it matters, and how to read it.
Why the DCF doesn't move my score
Most stock pages here carry a discounted cash flow estimate, and it has no say in the ranking at all. That isn't a lack of confidence in the math — it's what I think a DCF is actually good for, which is confirmation rather than valuation.
How to value a stock
A plain-English walkthrough of how to judge what a stock is worth — from the quick multiples to a proper cash-flow estimate — and how to avoid the traps that make cheap-looking stocks expensive.
Understanding economic moats
An economic moat is the durable advantage that lets a company defend its profits from competition. It's what turns a good year into a good decade — and the reason some businesses keep earning high returns while rivals can't catch up.
Understanding return on invested capital (ROIC)
Return on invested capital measures how much profit a company squeezes from every dollar of capital it puts to work. It carries more weight in the Bull Rankings quality score than any other single input — here's the metric, exactly how we score it, and what we found when we tried to measure it across 1,800 companies.
Understanding revenue growth
Revenue growth is the cleanest read on whether a business is winning more customers, raising prices, or both. It's also the most-massaged metric in equity research — knowing how to read TTM YoY vs sequential vs constant-currency separates real growth from accounting illusion.
Understanding free cash flow yield
FCF yield is what you'd own if you bought the whole company. A 7% yield means the business prints 7 cents of distributable cash per dollar of equity invested per year — more honest than dividend yield, harder to game than earnings yield.
Understanding the PEG ratio
PEG normalizes price-to-earnings against growth — it's how you compare a 30x compounder to a 10x cyclical without comparing apples to oranges. The shortcut: PEG under 1.0 is the GARP sweet spot; over 2.0 is paying up for growth that may not arrive.
P/E vs P/S: when to use which
Price-to-earnings is the default valuation multiple for profitable businesses; price-to-sales is what you fall back on when the business is pre-profit or running operating losses. Knowing which to use — and what bands count as cheap, fair, or expensive — is half of valuation.
Understanding debt-to-equity
Debt-to-equity measures how much a company has borrowed relative to what shareholders have left in. Read it as 'what happens if revenue stops for a year' — leverage that's invisible in a bull market becomes existential in a downturn.
Understanding return on equity
Return on equity tells you how much profit a business squeezes out of each dollar of shareholder capital. It's the cleanest read on capital efficiency — but only after you've checked whether the equity figure has been artificially shrunk by buybacks.
Understanding free cash flow
Free cash flow is what's left after a business funds its own operations and capex — the cleanest read on whether earnings are real. Here's what counts, what doesn't, and why a $5B FCF print at a $50B market cap is a stronger signal than the same number on a $500B name.
Strategies
Putting it together. The investing styles behind the score — quality, growth, and value — and how 'growth at a fair price' ties them into one number.
Why FICO Stock Fell 46%: VantageScore, FHFA, and What the Numbers Miss
Regulators opened the mortgage market to FICO's cheaper rival twice in September, and the stock lost almost half its value. Its fundamentals still look excellent, and that is exactly the problem: the numbers that made FICO look strong are the ones now under threat, and they haven't changed yet.
What Is a Growth Stock Worth With the 10-Year Treasury at 5.2%?
The Fed raised rates for the first time since 2023 and the 10-year Treasury touched 5.2%. The standard answer is that growth stocks are worth less. The math behind that answer is real, but it rests on an assumption almost nobody states, and my own model had the rate wrong for five months.
Why heavy capex makes great businesses look expensive
Six mega caps spent $579 billion on property and equipment in twelve months. Capital spending lands straight on free cash flow, and free cash flow yield feeds the value pillar — so the screen marks them down for it, though less than you might expect. Whether that is a flaw depends on what you think a score is for.
I sold the dividend to buy the story
I sold my entire Johnson & Johnson position in late 2022 to fund speculative buys. JNJ has returned 63% since, dividends included. The speculative buys went to zero.
How much of one stock is too much
I don't have a position-size limit. One name reached about 25% of my portfolio and I never trimmed it — here's why that's less reckless than it sounds.
The stock I got right — and the year my own screen would have thrown it away
I bought NVDA in 2022 on its growth record and have never sold a share. Run on the data it would have seen, my own model would have dropped it in 2023.
How I actually use these rankings
Do I use my own site? Yes — as a filter, not an oracle. How the Top 30, search and compare, and the theme pages fit into my own buying process.
How I decide when to sell — and why I usually don't
Two things make me exit a position outright. A third, far more common, makes me trim one — and the difference between them is where most selling mistakes come from.
The mistakes that cost me the most
A hype stock I lost over 75% on, a value trap I averaged down into, and years of buying dividends I didn't need — and what each one taught me.
What is a compounder stock?
A compounder is a high-quality business that can reinvest its profits at high returns for years on end, growing intrinsic value at a steady clip. They're the closest thing investing has to a flywheel — and they earn their own shelf on Bull Rankings.
Understanding GARP investing
GARP — growth at a reasonable price — is the discipline of buying good, growing businesses without overpaying for them. It sits between deep value and pure growth, and it is the core idea the entire Bull Rankings score is built to capture.
Understanding quality investing
Quality investing means owning businesses that earn high returns on the capital they employ and can sustain them. It's the sturdiest of the investing edges — and the first of the three pillars behind the Bull Rankings score.
Understanding momentum investing
Momentum is the tendency of recent winners to keep winning over the next several months — one of the most durable, widely-documented effects in markets. Here's how it works, and why the Bull Rankings model deliberately doesn't score on it.
Understanding turnaround investing
Turnarounds are out-of-favor companies posting accounting losses while still generating real cash — cyclical troughs and recovery plays the market has left for dead. Done with discipline, the survivors re-rate hard — though it's a different game from what the Bull Rankings quality-growth score rewards.
Understanding value investing
Value investing is buying a business for less than it's worth and waiting for the gap to close. It's the oldest edge in markets — rooted in mean reversion and the crowd's habit of overreacting to bad news — and one of the three pillars of the Bull Rankings quality-growth score.
Common questions
What is The Bull Rankings?
The Bull Rankings is a free, transparent stock-research model that scores US-listed companies on a single 0–100 quality-growth scale built from published fundamentals (banks, insurers and REITs get their own financial-strength score instead) — quality (returns, margins, leverage, earnings), growth, and value — refreshed every weekday. These guides explain the metrics and strategies behind that score so you can judge the picks for yourself.
Do I need to pay to read the guides?
No. The guides, the daily rankings, every stock's grade card, and the model portfolio's track record are all free to read.
Is any of this investment advice?
No. Everything here is educational research, not personalized financial advice and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. The score is a quantitative screen; it can't know your goals or risk tolerance. Always do your own research.
Looking for dated write-ups instead? Past weekly spotlights are in the Spotlight archive, and every daily refresh is in the daily recaps. These guides are educational and are not investment advice.