Benchmarks
Three questions that come up constantly among people who pick their own stocks, and that nothing on the open web answers properly. We answer them here, free, from statements filed with the SEC, with the submission behind every filed figure linked by accession number.
Would this rule have broken?
You pick a number as your line in the sand: return on equity stays above 15 percent, debt never exceeds equity. The obvious next question is whether the company has ever crossed it, and the obvious next question has no answer anywhere. These pages take one named condition and one company and report the fiscal years it would have broken in, each year linked to the annual report the figure was read from.
For example: The Coca-Cola Company against “Return on equity stays at or above 15 percent”, which would have broken in FY2017.
22 published, on companies with a full decade of filed accounts.
Why the same ratio has different values
Open three sites and read one company's debt-to-equity ratio and you will get three numbers. None of the three usually says which definition it used. All of them can be right at once, because “debt” names several different lines on a balance sheet and the ratio changes with the one you pick. These pages compute every published definition from the same filed statements and print them side by side, so you can see which one you were looking at.
For example: Costco Wholesale Corporation's debt to equity, where the definitions span a factor of 13.61 on one filing.
20 published.
Whether a figure is a lot
Knowing that a company earns 14 percent on invested capital tells you nothing until you know what everyone else earns. Every metric hub carries the percentile marks for every filer that has the figure on record, the same marks for each sector large enough to support them, and the sectors that were not, named with the reason we will not publish a median for them. Each cohort states its size and the date it was built.
All of them on one screen, each formula beside the level the market reports for it: the financial ratios cheat sheet.
16 metrics with a measured cohort. A metric the product does not build one for gets no page, and no page is written from prose in place of a cohort.
Gurus
Graham printed a current ratio of at least two. Greenblatt published no threshold at all and ranks instead. Both facts are easy to find and neither is worth much on its own: what is missing everywhere is where those lines fall in the market that exists now. These pages take one investor, state the tests they printed, and put each line among the companies that file the figure today, with the cohort size and the build date beside it. Where a test cannot be computed, the page says so and names what would be needed.
For example: Benjamin Graham, the defensive investor's criteria. Seven tests. Two measured across the market, and why the rest are not.
20 investors, 6 with a page of their own. No holdings, no filings by any investor, and no biography: an investor gets a page for a method, not for a name.
Free tools
No account, no card, no email.
- Retro-test a condition
- Write one numeric condition on one US-listed company and see every fiscal year it would have been false, read out of the accounts filed with the SEC. The pages in this section are that question already answered on companies we chose; the tool answers it on the company you own.
- Companies
- Every company we cover in one table, with eight value ratios you can sort and filter, before you pay anything.
What limits this section
A previous version of this site published tens of thousands of pages generated from one template over a list of companies. Almost none of them were ever indexed, and they deserved not to be. So this section is governed by rules that are enforced in the code that builds it, not by intention:
- A page exists only if it carries something you cannot get by reading a screener: the years a rule broke, or the reconciliation of definitions. If it does not, the template is not built.
- A page exists only if the filings support it. A company without a full decade of filed accounts, or a figure its filings do not carry, produces no URL at all rather than a page with an empty table.
- Every published filed figure is recomputed from a document filed with the SEC and names the accession number it came from, and a ratio with a price in it names the day of its close. No filed figure here is passed through from a data vendor.
- New pages ship in batches of at most 50, with 21 days between batches so that indexing can be read before more are added. The next batch cannot be authorised before 2026-09-23.
- No page here tells you what to do. Each one reports what filed documents say and stops.
Everything in this section is research, not advice. It is not a view on any security and not a recommendation. See our methodology for how the filings are read and what the product refuses to compute.