How to use these guides
The Bull Rankings model scores every US-listed stock on one transparent 0–110 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 three investing strategies that define the buckets. If you already know your way around a balance sheet, jump straight to whichever metric or strategy you want a refresher on.
How the model works
Start here. What the Bull Rankings score actually measures, and how a whole market gets distilled into one transparent number.
The research behind the rankings: what we tested, kept, and threw out
Most stock models are black boxes that only ever show you their wins. This is the opposite — a plain-English tour of how the Bull Rankings score is actually built, the one rule that governs every change to it, and the signals we tested and deliberately rejected because they didn't hold up out of sample.
How the Bull Rankings model works
A transparent, quantitative model that scores US-listed stocks every day and sorts the best into three buckets — Momentum Leaders, Value, and Turnarounds. Here is exactly what goes in, how the scoring works, and the rules that keep us honest.
How the Bull Rankings score works
Every stock the model grades gets a single composite number — typically 60-100. Here's the seven-signal recipe, the synergy and risk adjustments layered on top, and exactly why a value-bucket name with a 95 ranks above a growth name with a 92.
Metrics & fundamentals
The building blocks. Each signal the score is built from — what it means, why it matters, and how to read it.
Understanding the DCF cross-check
A discounted cash flow model estimates what a business is worth today based on the cash it will produce in the future. We show one on every stock page — but we use it as a sanity check, not a price target. Here's how it works, why the inputs matter more than the output, and how to read ours.
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 three buckets — and what makes a name a momentum leader, a value play, or a turnaround.
Quality momentum: buying strong businesses that are already working
Naked price momentum buys whatever has gone up — including junk. Pairing a strict quality gate with a momentum ranking keeps the edge while screening out the lottery tickets. This is the strategy behind our Momentum Leaders bucket.
Understanding momentum investing
Momentum is the tendency of recent winners to keep winning over the next several months. It is one of the most durable, widely-documented effects in financial markets — and the engine behind our Momentum Leaders bucket.
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. This is the logic behind our Turnarounds bucket.
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 the logic behind our Value bucket.
Looking for the daily recaps and weekly digests instead? They live in the recap archive. These guides are educational and are not investment advice.