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.
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 every US-listed stock each day on one quality-growth number — strong, growing businesses at a fair price. 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 quality-growth number from 0 to 100. Here's the three-pillar recipe — quality, growth, and value — the grade card beneath it, and why the blend means a name has to be good at all three.
Metrics & fundamentals
The building blocks. Each signal the score is built from — what it means, why it matters, and how to read it.
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's the single clearest gauge of business quality — and a core input to the Bull Rankings score.
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 score — quality, growth, and value — and how 'growth at a fair price' ties them into one number.
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.
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