HSBC

What it would cost to take over the entire firm (equity plus debt, less cash) per dollar of pre-interest, pre-tax, pre-depreciation operating earnings. Capital-structure-agnostic — directly comparable across heavily and lightly levered businesses, which a P/E can't do. The weakness: EBITDA ignores capex, so capital-intensive businesses look artificially cheap on this metric. Cross-check with EV/FCF when capex is meaningful.

Divides the trailing P/E by the year-over-year EPS growth rate (in percentage points). Below 1.0 is conventionally read as 'cheap relative to growth'; above 2 implies the multiple is well ahead of recent growth. Sensitive to which growth window you choose and unstable when earnings cross zero — flips sign or explodes when prior EPS is negative.

Peter Lynch's adjustment to PEG: adds the dividend yield to the growth rate in the denominator so that mature dividend payers don't get unfairly punished by a low growth rate alone. Sweet spot is 1.0 (P/E equals growth plus yield); below 0.5 often signals a broken growth assumption rather than genuine value; above 2 is over-paying.

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.

Joel Greenblatt's reformulation of return-on-capital, designed to filter for businesses that earn high pre-tax returns on the tangible operating capital that actually generates EBIT. Excludes goodwill and acquired intangibles so that two firms with the same operating economics rank similarly regardless of acquisition history. Pairs with Greenblatt's Earnings Yield (EBIT/EV) to produce the famous 'Magic Formula' rank — quality stocks at value prices.

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.

Top-line growth — the cleanest way to see whether the franchise is expanding. Best read alongside margin trend: revenue rising while margin compresses is often discount-driven volume rather than real growth, and can mask underlying weakness. Compare to industry peers — what looks weak in absolute terms can be best-in-sector if the industry is contracting.

The single best operations-quality metric. Negative CCC means the firm is funded by suppliers — the customer pays before the supplier needs to be paid (Apple, Costco, Amazon at scale). Long CCC ties up working capital and forces operating-loan dependence. Combines three sub-metrics: days inventory outstanding, days sales outstanding, days payable outstanding.

How long the average sale sits as a receivable before becoming cash. Earnings-quality flag: receivables growing faster than revenue is one of the cleanest tells for revenue recognition stretching — Beneish flagged exactly this pattern as a primary fraud indicator. Industry context matters: B2B / project businesses run longer DSO than retail, but the trend is more important than the level.

DuPont productivity measure. Combined with margin, it tells the asset-light vs. asset-heavy story: low turnover with high margin is the luxury / branded model, high turnover with thin margin is the supermarket / discount model. Very high turnover in retail can also flag stockouts (lost sales) — the metric reads best industry-relative, not absolute.

CCI measures how far the current typical price ((H+L+C)/3) sits from its rolling SMA, normalized by the mean absolute deviation. Originally built for commodity cycles by Donald Lambert; widely used as a generic momentum / overbought-oversold gauge on any asset. CCI is unbounded but ±100 is the conventional 'normal range' edge — readings beyond that are interpreted as strong directional thrusts or stretched extremes depending on context.

+1 while CCI is below -100 (oversold); -1 while CCI is above +100 (overbought); 0 inside the ±100 band.

+1 = oversold (stretched below the typical-price mean, mean-reversion buy bias), -1 = overbought (stretched above), 0 = inside the ±100 band.

Designed to buy oversold pullbacks within an established uptrend (price above the regime moving average). Uses a 2-period RSI rather than the standard 14 to make it hyper-responsive to short-term swings. The default exit_method is RSI-threshold based: hold while RSI(2) is below the configured exit threshold and exit when RSI(2) crosses above exit. The book-style SMA exit is also supported by setting exit_method=sma with exit_ma.

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

+1 = pullback-buy state active, -1 = pullback-short state active (symmetric rule in a down regime), 0 = flat.

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.

Compares price pivots against the MACD histogram (MACD line minus signal line) at those same bars. Bullish divergence: price makes a lower low, histogram makes a higher low — momentum is improving beneath the surface. Bearish divergence: price makes a higher high, histogram makes a lower high. Slower than the MACD signal cross but a richer confirmatory tell — the histogram captures momentum acceleration, not just direction.

+1 at the right-hand pivot of bullish divergence; -1 at right-hand pivot of bearish divergence; 0 otherwise.

+1 = bullish divergence, -1 = bearish divergence.