The universe: the one list every score comes from

Every score, every screen and every Top 10 pick comes from one list. We call it the universe, and it currently holds 973 companies across the US, the UK and Canada.

That number is not a soft target. If a ticker is not in the universe, it has no Returnolio score, it will never appear in the Top 10, and it will not show up in the screener. There is no partial coverage tier.

What is in it

Large and mid-cap listed companies in three markets, cap being short for market capitalisation, the value of all a company's shares added up. The requirement that actually binds is data, not popularity: a company needs enough fundamental history for the scoring inputs to be well defined, which in practice means about ten years of quarterly financials where that history exists. A company with two years of filings cannot be scored on margin stability or growth durability, so it stays out until it can be.

The full inclusion rule sits with the methodology rather than here. See The backtest for how the same list is used in the simulation.

How a company enters and leaves

Companies join when they meet the coverage rules and have the filing history to support a score. They drop out when they are acquired, delisted or renamed. That is the whole lifecycle.

One consequence is worth stating plainly, because it affects how you should read our historical numbers. The universe is the present-day list. Companies that went bankrupt or shrank out of the large and mid-cap range along the way are not in it, and never were during a backtest run. That's survivorship bias. Ask a room full of lottery winners whether the lottery pays, and it pays. It flatters backtested returns, and we flag it in the methodology too.

What a missing ticker means for you

A missing ticker means one thing: we do not cover it. Not that it is a bad company, not that we scored it and disliked it. Small caps, most of Europe, all of Asia, anything freshly listed. All absent, all for the same boring reason.

So do not read the universe as a recommendation list, and do not treat absence as a verdict. If you hold something we do not cover, Returnolio has nothing to say about it, and you should keep using whatever you use today.

Educational and proprietary. This explains what our research does, not the exact formula behind it, and it is not personalised investment advice. See the full disclaimer.