Legal
Positions declared
Policy in force from October 1, 2026, revised October 14, 2026 to add partners and referrals. It is not a contract and there is nothing here to accept: it is a rule we hold ourselves to, published so you can check it.
ValueScreener ranks companies, publishes scores for them and writes about them. The scores are research outputs, not ratings or recommendations. Anyone doing that who also owns one of them has a reason to be generous about it, and you have no way of knowing unless we tell you.
So this page carries three things: what the people behind this product hold, dated, the rules that decide what they may hold at all, and who is paid to recommend it.
1What is held today
As of October 3, 2026, nobody bound by this policy holds a position in any company ValueScreener covers.
Declared by the founder, for everyone bound by the policy on October 3, 2026. Re-confirmed at least every 90 days, and at once whenever a position opens, closes or changes.
2Who this binds
Everyone who can influence what ValueScreener publishes. A rank and a score are computed by code, so whoever can change the code can change the output, and the rule follows the ability rather than the job title.
- The founder.
- Employees, contractors, freelancers and agencies, paid or unpaid.
- Anyone with write access to the repository, the database or the deployment.
- Anyone who decides which companies are covered, surfaced, featured, written about or used as a worked example.
- Advisers and investors in the company who see a surface before it ships.
It binds each of them for their own account and for any account whose trades they direct, including accounts in their household, because a holding in the same household is the same economic interest. It stops binding a person 30 days after they can no longer influence what is published.
3What counts as a position
Any economic interest in a company inside the coverage universe: shares, depositary receipts, options, warrants, convertibles, short positions, contracts for difference and spread bets.
Broad index funds, diversified exchange-traded funds, mutual funds and accounts a third party manages with full discretion are outside this policy. The holder does not choose what is in them, and nothing we publish about one company can move their interest in it.
4What may and may not be held
| Rule | |
|---|---|
| Long shares in a covered company | Permitted, subject to the blackouts and the register below. |
| Short positions in a covered company | Never. A short is a motive to publish a bad read, which is touting with the sign reversed. |
| Options, warrants, convertibles, contracts for difference, spread bets | Never. Leverage turns a publication date into a payday. |
| Anything held for less than 30 days | Never. A holding bought and sold around what we publish cannot be told apart from trading on it, whatever the intent was. |
| Payment or anything of value from a company we cover | Never. No paid coverage, no sponsored placement, no investor-relations retainer, no affiliate arrangement on a named company, no fee for appearing on any surface of this product. There is no price for being here. |
5Partners and referrals
Some people who recommend ValueScreener are paid partners: we pay them a share of what the readers they refer pay us, or give them service credit. Partners never choose, see in advance or influence what we publish about any company.
6Blackout periods
No buying and no selling in a covered company during any of these:
- Newly covered: from the moment a company is proposed for coverage until 30 days after its first public page is live.
- Newly surfaced: from the moment a company is chosen for, or becomes likely to enter, a ranked rail, a featured list or any other surface that singles it out, until 30 days after it appears there.
- Newly written about: seven days either side of any publication naming the company outside the routine computed surfaces, such as a post, a lesson, a worked example or an email.
- A pending change to how it is ranked: from the moment a change to a formula, a weighting, a screen or a coverage rule is proposed, where that change would move the company, until 30 days after it is live.
A holding already in place when a blackout starts is not sold into it. Selling on the knowledge that a company is about to be promoted is the same trade as buying, run backwards. It is frozen, declared above, and may be sold once the blackout ends.
7The register, and how this page stays true
A trade in a covered company is written down before the order is placed, with the date, the company, the direction and a line confirming no blackout applies. The register is a dated file in the source code of this site, so its history is version controlled and an entry cannot be backdated without the record saying so. This page renders that file and nothing else.
Three rules are enforced by the build rather than by diligence:
- An empty register is not a statement that nothing is held. "Nobody holds anything" is a separate thing a person has to write down and sign, so the page can never assert it by default.
- A declaration older than 90 days stops speaking in the present tense: the page then says only what was true on the date it was confirmed.
- A declaration that is out of date, dated in the future, or self-contradictory fails the build, so it cannot reach this page at all.
8When this is broken
A breach is published here, with the date it happened and the date it was found, rather than quietly corrected. Anything we published while an undisclosed position was open is corrected under the correction policy, and the correction says what the position was. For a contractor or an employee, a breach ends the engagement.
This policy is about who owns what. It does not change what any figure on this site means, and the risk disclaimer covers that. It also does not displace any duty a person has under their own employer's rules, their broker's agreement or the law where they live.