GILD

Valuation expressed against the cash actually available to all capital providers after capex. Often more honest than EV/EBITDA when capital expenditure is meaningful relative to depreciation, because EBITDA ignores capex entirely while FCF reflects it. The cleanest single-number 'what would I pay to own this whole business?' valuation lens for capital-intensive firms.

Capital-structure-agnostic earnings yield. Pairs with Greenblatt ROC to compute the famous Magic Formula rank (the universe-rank of earnings yield plus universe-rank of return on capital). Pre-tax operating earnings divided by the full claim on the firm gives a cleaner cross-firm valuation comparison than P/E or earnings yield alone, because it strips out the distortions from leverage, cash, and tax structure.

Lower is generally better for shareholder cash returns — less of every dollar of revenue gets reinvested in maintaining the asset base. But very low values can flag under-investment in a capital-intensive business, which catches up later via deteriorating capacity or competitiveness. Pairs with FCF margin to separate 'thin operating margin' from 'fat operating margin offset by heavy capex'.

Sanity-check on earnings quality — a ratio of 1.0 means every dollar of GAAP earnings shows up as free cash flow. Persistently below 1.0 means working-capital build or capex is consuming earnings; persistently above 1.0 is unusual and may flag accounting conservatism (heavy non-cash charges) or a one-time release. Trend matters more than absolute level.

Easier to compare than operating margin across firms with very different leverage and depreciation profiles, because it adds D&A back. Software platforms commonly run above 30%; capital-light service businesses cluster around 20%; capital-intensive industrials sit below 15%. The weakness: ignores the cash needed to maintain the asset base — pair with FCF margin for a complete profitability picture.

End-to-end conversion ratio: of every dollar of revenue, how much falls through to genuine free cash flow available to all capital providers? More honest than net margin because it accounts for the capex needed to maintain (and grow) the business. The single best indicator of whether the business is a quality compounder or a GAAP-earnings illusion.

Operating margin minus interest, tax, and below-the-line items. Useful but noisier than operating margin: tax rate changes, debt-service shifts, and one-time items can move net margin year-over-year even when the operating business is unchanged. Always pair with operating margin and FCF margin — divergence between them is a tell about leverage, tax structure, or earnings quality.

Captures the leverage between revenue and operating profit — the core test of whether a business converts sales into income at the operating level. Independent of capital structure (excludes interest) and tax-jurisdiction noise. Trend matters as much as level: an improving operating margin indicates pricing power or operational efficiency gains; a falling margin signals input-cost pressure, wage inflation, or competitive erosion.

Capital-efficiency measure that ignores how the assets are financed. Useful for comparing within a sector but heavily biased by industry — banks and utilities run low ROA by design (huge balance sheets), software and franchise businesses run high ROA (asset-light). The DuPont decomposition links it to ROE: ROE = ROA × (assets / equity), so leverage inflates the gap between ROA and ROE.

Pre-tax cousin of ROIC using operating capital employed (long-term debt plus equity, approximately equal to total assets minus current liabilities). Damodaran publishes ROCE by industry annually, so it benchmarks cleanly against sector norms. Particularly useful for capital-intensive businesses where you want to see pre-tax returns on the long-term capital base.

Bottom-line growth on a per-share basis — captures both operating progress and any net buyback effect. The denominator uses the absolute value of prior EPS so a turnaround from negative to positive earnings reads with the conventional sign rather than producing arithmetic nonsense. Pair with revenue growth to separate real franchise expansion from buyback-driven per-share lift.

Sustainability check on the dividend yield. Below 30% means the dividend has substantial room to grow; 30–60% is the conventional sweet spot for a mature payer; above 85% is stretched and frequently precedes a cut. REITs and utilities run higher than the broad market by design — REIT payouts above 80% are normal because the structure requires distributing most income.

The Coppock Curve is a weighted moving average of the sum of two rate-of-change measures, originally designed as a long-horizon, buy-only bottom indicator for equity indices. This screener applies it to daily bars and adds a bearish state for symmetry: a cross up through zero is the classic long-term buy tell, a cross down through zero flags a bearish momentum cycle.

+1 while the Coppock Curve is above zero; -1 while it is below zero; 0 only at exactly zero.

+1 = bullish zero-line cross (classic long-term buy), -1 = bearish zero-line cross.

Fires on the bar where the MACD line (EMA12 minus EMA26) crosses through the signal line (EMA9 of MACD). Bullish when MACD crosses up through signal, bearish when it crosses down. Far more commonly used as a trade trigger than divergence — see macd_divergence for the slower confirmatory tell. Whipsaws in chop; cleanest when combined with a trend-regime filter.

+1 on bullish cross (MACD crosses up through signal); -1 on bearish cross (MACD crosses down through signal); 0 otherwise.

+1 = bullish MACD-signal cross, -1 = bearish MACD-signal cross.

ROC is the simplest momentum oscillator: (close − close_N_ago) / close_N_ago × 100. It's unbounded, sign-bearing, and reads as 'how much price has moved in absolute % terms over the lookback'. A configurable threshold (default 5%) separates ordinary fluctuation from strong directional thrusts. Useful as a coarse momentum cross when you want a less smoothed signal than RSI or MACD.

+1 while ROC is above +threshold (strong bullish thrust); -1 while ROC is below −threshold (strong bearish thrust); 0 inside the ±threshold band.

+1 = ROC above +threshold (bullish thrust), -1 = ROC below −threshold (bearish thrust), 0 = ROC within ±threshold.