APA

Valuation expressed against the cash actually available to all capital providers. Often more honest than EV/EBITDA when capex is meaningful relative to D&A.

Adjusts the numerator for debt and cash so heavily-levered or cash-rich companies are comparable. Particularly useful for cross-industry valuation work.

How many dollars of book equity each share represents. Useful for asset-heavy businesses (banks, industrials) where book value approximates liquidation floor; less informative for asset-light franchises whose value is in intangibles.

Multiple of trailing-twelve-month earnings the market has assigned to the company. Lower means cheaper relative to current earnings power, but a single low P/E can also mean the market expects earnings to fall.

Useful when earnings are negative or noisy (early-stage companies, restructurings). Works best within an industry because gross margin profiles vary wildly.

Productivity of the asset base. Combined with net margin, this is the DuPont decomposition of ROA: ROA = net_margin * asset_turnover.

Sanity-check on earnings quality. Persistently below 1 means working capital or capex is consuming earnings; persistently above 1 is unusual and may flag accounting conservatism or non-cash drags.

End-to-end conversion ratio: of every dollar of revenue, how much falls through to genuine free cash flow available to capital providers? More honest than net margin because it accounts for capex needed to maintain the business.

FCF the business throws off relative to what you pay for the equity. Treats the equity as a perpetual claim on cash. Cyclicals can swing below zero in a downturn.

Pre-capex version of cash conversion. Numbers persistently below 1 suggest accruals are doing the work; numbers persistently above 1 are a (mild) positive sign.

Captures the leverage between revenue and operating profit. Core test of whether a business converts sales into income at the operating level.

Headline profitability metric. High ROE compounds book value if the business can reinvest at the same return. Beware of buybacks artificially inflating ROE by shrinking the denominator.

Lets you compare equity earning power directly to bond yields. A 6% earnings yield is the equity-side analog to a 6% coupon, with the difference being earnings can grow (or contract).

Richard Sloan's accruals-quality measure. Persistent positive accruals (NI exceeds OCF) tend to mean-revert via earnings disappointments. Large negative values are usually fine but can flag one-time working-capital releases or non-cash drags. Phase D-2 made this a target-window metric centred at zero.

Buys oversold pullbacks within an established uptrend (price above the 200-day SMA). Holds while RSI(2) is below an exit threshold; exits when RSI(2) crosses above 60.

+1 when price is above regime_ma and RSI(2) drops below oversold; held while inside the trade; back to 0 when RSI(2) crosses above exit.

+1 = pullback-buy state active, 0 = flat. Bear-side variant uses the symmetric short rule.

ADX (Average Directional Index) measures trend strength regardless of direction. Below ~20 historically associates with sideways/choppy markets unfavorable to trend strategies.

+1 while ADX is below the threshold (weak trend); 0 otherwise.

+1 = weak trend (chop) - typically a signal to disable trend strategies, not to trade direction.

Turtle-style breakout signal: enters long on a close above the highest high of the lookback window, short on a close below the lowest low. Holds the position for a fixed number of bars.

+1 on long entry, held for hold_bars; -1 on short entry, held for hold_bars.

+1 = long breakout state, -1 = short breakout state.