The case for it
12 pages in this section.
- How the model works: the Returnolio score and its five pillarsOne 0 - 100 headline per company, with five pillars beside it on the page. What each pillar measures, how to read the score, and what one number cannot tell you.
- RTEP: economic profit, and why accounting profit liesA company can report a profit every year and still fall short of what its capital costs. RTEP charges every business for the capital it uses, at its own cost, and treats research as an investment. Two real companies show the difference.
- Economic profit vs net income: how a profitable company loses valueNet income charges a company for its debt and nothing for its shareholders' money. Economic profit charges for both. Xcel Energy shows how a company can report a profit every year and still fall short of what its capital costs.
- Is R&D an expense or an investment?Accounting rules expense research the year it is spent. Economically it is an investment that pays off for years. What changes when you book it as one, shown on Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Adobe.
- Quality score: how to measure a good businessWhat separates a genuinely good business from a merely profitable one: consistency, improvement, long-term growth and investment in the moat, scored 0 to 100 and blind to price.
- Momentum: when price and earnings move togetherWhether the share price is already moving with the business, and whether the company keeps reporting earnings above expectations, measured across several windows instead of one.
- Margin of safety: is the price reasonable?Whether you are paying a sensible price for the growth you are buying, judged against the company's own history and its sector rather than one flat rule for everything.
- Insider and congressional stock trading, trackedTwelve months of insider and political trading on every company we cover, tagged by chamber and filing date, so you can see who bought what and when they had to tell you.
- How to calculate the fair value of a stockTwo ways to put a number on what a business is worth, its industry's multiple and its own history, side by side, plus a cash-flow value that declines to guess when the inputs cannot carry one.
- How the Top 10 is chosen, and by whomThe score ranks the universe. It does not choose the list. These are the rules that turn a ranking into the ten companies we write up, and hold, each month.
- Moonshot Detected: the momentum names inside the Top 10Up to three of the monthly Top 10 are companies the market has kept repricing upward, admitted only through the same safety checks as every pick and only when market conditions favor them. Clearly badged.
- Our 13-year backtest, and what it cannot proveThirteen years of point-in-time testing, scored to the day each filing reached the SEC. How the test was built, what it returned, the limits we will not talk around, and why a person reads every list before it goes out.