NICM

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.

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.

The multiple equity analysts most commonly quote because it reflects expected earnings rather than the trailing window. Same caveats as trailing P/E plus one extra: the denominator depends on consensus estimates, which can be systematically optimistic going into a downturn or pessimistic at a cyclical trough. Worth cross-checking against trailing P/E and sell-side estimate trend.

An ABSOLUTE intrinsic-value signal, distinct from the relative multiples (PE, EV/EBITDA) which only compare a stock to its industry peers. Intrinsic value comes from the Residual Income Model: book value plus the present value of the residual income (earnings above a charge for the cost of equity) the firm is forecast to generate. This is the best-VALIDATED absolute value signal in the academic literature (Frankel & Lee 1998, replicated through 2026): the value-to-price ratio robustly predicts 1-3 year cross-sectional returns, survives every major factor model, and subsumes book-to-market. Because it is scored across the WHOLE universe (not within-industry), it complements the relative multiples rather than double-counting them. Pair it with a quality screen (Piotroski) to avoid value traps, and read the EPV decomposition to see whether a discount is unpriced earnings power or just speculative growth coming out of the price. One caveat: the model anchors on book equity, so for low-book, buyback-heavy, or asset-light firms (think Apple or Coca-Cola) book is a poor floor and the model can read durable franchises as wildly overvalued. Readings are clamped, and the metric is currently shadow-scored — shown for context, with zero weight in the fundamentals grade — pending validation.

How many dollars of share price the market is willing to pay for one dollar of trailing-twelve-month earnings. The universal valuation anchor for profitable companies — useful for cross-sector comparison and as a quick read on whether the market expects earnings growth, decline, or a quality re-rating. Sensitive to one-off items in the denominator (write-downs, tax holidays, share buybacks); pair with EV/EBITDA when capital structure or non-cash charges look noisy.

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.

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.

Pre-capex version of cash conversion: compares operating cash flow directly to net income, before subtracting capex. Numbers persistently below 1.0 suggest accruals are doing the work (revenue recognised before cash collected, or expenses deferred). Numbers above 1.0 are typically driven by D&A exceeding true economic depreciation — a mild positive sign but not always meaningful.

The headline profitability metric. Net income divided by average book equity tells you how productive each dollar of shareholders' capital is. High sustained ROE compounds book value when the business can reinvest at a similar return. Two warnings: ROE rises mechanically with leverage (high D/E inflates ROE without making the business better), and aggressive buybacks can shrink the equity denominator faster than they shrink earnings, artificially boosting ROE even as fundamental returns are flat.

Measures how productive the actual operating capital base is, independent of capital structure. Strips out the effects of cash, leverage, and below-the-line items so you see the underlying economic engine. The benchmark is the firm's weighted-average cost of capital (WACC) — sustained ROIC above WACC creates value, sustained ROIC below WACC destroys it. The single most important profitability metric for long-term compounding.

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.

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.

Direct cash income from holding the share. Stable dividend yield over time often signals capital discipline and predictable cash generation; abnormally high yield is frequently a warning that the dividend isn't covered by free cash flow and may be cut. Always read alongside payout ratio and FCF coverage.

Net income divided by market cap, expressed as a percent. 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 that earnings can grow (or contract) while a bond coupon is fixed. The standard 'is the equity risk-premium adequate?' framing.

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.

Captures the full cash return to shareholders — dividends plus share repurchases, expressed as a percentage of market cap. Buyback-heavy issuers (Apple, Alphabet) hide their real cash return behind a low headline dividend yield; total shareholder yield surfaces it. Increasingly the right lens for evaluating capital-return quality, especially for tech-era large-caps that prefer buybacks to dividends.

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.

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.

When price prints a lower low while RSI prints a higher low at those same pivot bars, momentum is improving even though price is still falling — a classic bullish divergence that often precedes a reversal up. The bearish mirror fires when price makes a higher high but RSI prints a lower high, telegraphing exhausted upside. Divergences are confirmation tells rather than precise timing signals — best used as a 'something is changing under the surface' alert, not a trade trigger on their own.

+1 at the right-hand pivot of a (lower-low price, higher-low RSI) pair; -1 at the right-hand pivot of a (higher-high price, lower-high RSI) pair; 0 otherwise.

+1 = bullish divergence, -1 = bearish divergence, 0 = no divergence at this bar.

The 14-period Relative Strength Index is the canonical Wilder momentum oscillator, bounded 0-100. Readings below 30 mark oversold conditions and above 70 mark overbought. This signal flags time spent at those extremes: bullish while RSI is at or below 30 (a mean-reversion bounce bias), bearish while it is at or above 70. The 30/70 thresholds are standard practice layered on top of the TA-Lib primitive.

+1 while RSI(14) is at or below the oversold threshold (default 30); -1 while it is at or above the overbought threshold (default 70); 0 in between.

+1 = oversold (bullish mean-reversion bias), -1 = overbought (bearish), 0 = RSI in its mid-range.

MFI is essentially RSI computed on (typical price × volume) instead of close alone, so high-volume bars push the oscillator harder than low-volume bars. It's 0-100 bounded and uses the same 20/80 OB-OS convention as a slower RSI. Because it folds in volume, MFI can flag distribution / accumulation underneath a flat price tape that RSI would miss.

+1 while MFI is below 20 (oversold); -1 while MFI is above 80 (overbought); 0 in between.

+1 = oversold (bullish, volume-weighted), -1 = overbought (bearish), 0 = mid-range.

Bullish when %K crosses above %D while both lines are below the oversold threshold (typically 20); bearish when %K crosses below %D while both are above overbought (typically 80). Filters out mid-range stochastic crosses, which whipsaw in chop. Best used at well-defined ranges and at trend extremes.

+1 on bullish cross in oversold; -1 on bearish cross in overbought; 0 otherwise.

+1 = oversold bullish cross, -1 = overbought bearish cross.

Stochastic RSI applies the stochastic oscillator formula to RSI values rather than price, producing a faster, more sensitive 0-100 momentum read. Readings below 20 are oversold and above 80 overbought. The signal latches bullish when FastK crosses above FastD while in the oversold zone and stays on until FastK drops back below FastD; the bearish mirror latches on a cross down in the overbought zone. More reactive than plain RSI, so best filtered by trend context.

+1 latches when FastK crosses above FastD while FastK is below the oversold threshold (default 20), and holds until FastK falls back below FastD; -1 latches when FastK crosses below FastD while FastK is above the overbought threshold (default 80), and holds until FastK rises back above FastD; 0 otherwise.

+1 = bullish oversold cross still latched, -1 = bearish overbought cross still latched, 0 = no latched cross.

Larry Williams' Ultimate Oscillator blends buying-pressure ratios over three lookbacks (7/14/28) into a single 0-100 reading, designed to reduce the false extremes that plague single-period oscillators. Below 30 is oversold and above 70 overbought. The signal flags time spent in those zones: oversold reads bullish (mean-reversion bounce bias), overbought reads bearish.

+1 while the Ultimate Oscillator is at or below the oversold threshold (default 30); -1 while it is at or above the overbought threshold (default 70); 0 in between.

+1 = oversold (bullish), -1 = overbought (bearish), 0 = oscillator mid-range.

Williams %R maps close-to-range position onto a -100 to 0 scale: -100 means the close is right at the lookback period's low (oversold), 0 means right at the period's high (overbought). The oscillator's interpretation mirrors RSI but the scale is inverted. Like other OB/OS oscillators, it works best as a tactical timing aid inside an already-established trend, not as a standalone reversal trigger in choppy markets.

+1 while %R is below -80 (oversold); -1 while %R is above -20 (overbought); 0 in between.

+1 = oversold (bullish), -1 = overbought (bearish), 0 = mid-range.

Reports whether the close sits within the configured proximity (default 1%) of the rolling 252-bar high or low. New-highs and new-lows are universally watched screening filters — momentum and breakout strategies start from here, and the broad market's new-high / new-low spread is a foundational breadth indicator.

+1 while close is within proximity of the 252-bar high; -1 while close is within proximity of the 252-bar low; 0 mid-range.

+1 = near 52-week high, -1 = near 52-week low, 0 = mid-range.

Composite trend system: bullish when the tenkan crosses above the kijun, price is above the cloud (Kumo), and the close is above its level from 26 bars ago (Chikou-style momentum confirmation).

+1 on bullish trigger conditions, -1 on bearish, 0 otherwise.

+1 = full Ichimoku bullish setup, -1 = full bearish setup.

Computes the period-bar log-return spread (ticker minus SPY) and ranks the spread against its trailing 252-bar quantile. SPY = SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust ('SPDR' = Standard & Poor's Depositary Receipts), the standard proxy for the US large-cap market. Ranking against the trailing window means the same threshold works in both gentle bull markets and high-volatility regimes — the metric is calibrated against the ticker's own history, not a fixed cutoff.

+1 while the ticker-vs-SPY spread ranks at or above the high_pct percentile (default 0.8 — the top 20%) of its trailing window; -1 while at or below low_pct (default 0.2 — the bottom 20%); 0 otherwise.

+1 = clear outperformance regime, -1 = clear underperformance regime.

The DI ordering only counts while the ADX line confirms a real trend (ADX >= adx_min, default 25); in weak-ADX chop the signal stays neutral.

+1 while +DI > -DI and ADX >= adx_min (default 25); -1 while -DI > +DI and ADX >= 25; 0 while ADX is below 25 or the DI lines are tied.

+1 = +DI leading with ADX-confirmed trend strength, -1 = -DI leading with ADX-confirmed trend strength.

Aroon measures how recently the highest-high and lowest-low occurred inside the lookback (default 25 bars) and reports the difference as a single -100 to +100 oscillator. Positive values mean the most recent high is fresher than the most recent low (uptrend); negative values mean the opposite. Crosses through ±50 are commonly used as trend-onset / trend-loss alerts. Less reactive to whipsaws than price-only momentum oscillators.

+1 while the oscillator is above high_threshold (default +50), -1 while it is below low_threshold (default -50), 0 in between.

+1 = uptrend state (oscillator above +50), -1 = downtrend state (oscillator below -50), 0 = no clear trend tilt.

The Parabolic SAR (Stop and Reverse) plots a dot above or below price; when price crosses the SAR, the trend side flips and the dot jumps to the opposite side. The flip event itself is the trade trigger. Works well in clean trends, gets whipsawed in chop.

+1 on flip from above-price (bearish) to below-price (bullish); -1 on flip the other way.

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

SuperTrend places a trailing band a multiple of ATR (default 3x a 10-period ATR) above or below price and flips the band side when price closes through it. When price flips above the band the trend is up (bullish); when it flips below the trend is down (bearish). A volatility-adaptive trend-following tool whose stop-and-reverse band widens in volatile tape and tightens in quiet tape.

+1 while price holds above the SuperTrend band (uptrend state); -1 while it holds below (downtrend state). The state persists until price closes through the opposite band.

+1 = bullish SuperTrend state (price above band), -1 = bearish SuperTrend state (price below band).

While price is above its 200-day MA (uptrend regime), buy when today's close is the lowest in 7 sessions; exit when today's close is the highest in 7 sessions. A simple, robust short-term mean-reversion system — works because pullbacks within an uptrend tend to be shallow and quickly retraced. Symmetrically, the bearish variant short-sells 7-day highs in downtrends.

+1 on entry (new 7-day low closing above the 200-day MA), held until a new 7-day high; -1 on the mirror short entry (new 7-day high closing below the MA), held until a new 7-day low; 0 when flat.

+1 = pullback-buy state active, -1 = short-fade state active (7-day high below the 200-day MA), 0 = flat.

Identifies the most recent significant swing high and low, projects the standard Fibonacci levels (23.6%, 38.2%, 50%, 61.8%, 78.6%) across the swing, and fires only when price rejects off one of those levels back in the prior-trend direction. In an active uptrend the trigger fires when a bar's low pierces a Fib support by up to 0.5 ATR and closes back above it; in a downtrend the mirror case fires at Fib resistance. A 2×ATR swing-range floor suppresses emission inside noisy consolidations where every level sits within one ATR of every other. Only the first touch fires: the bar that arrives at a level after at least 3 bars away is the event — price sitting at a level does not re-fire day after day. Fibonacci levels are self-fulfilling support/resistance — heavily watched by chart-driven traders, so rejections at them tend to act as decision points whether the underlying ratios mean anything or not.

+1 in an uptrend when the bar's low pierces a Fib support (within atr_mult x ATR) and the close finishes above it; -1 in a downtrend when the bar's high pierces a Fib resistance and the close finishes below it. First touch only: fires only when none of the prior clear_bars (3) bars were at a level. 0 otherwise.

+1 = bullish rejection at Fib support, -1 = bearish rejection at Fib resistance, 0 = no rejection event.

Bearish head-and-shoulders: a left shoulder, a higher center peak (head), and a right shoulder of comparable height to the left, broken by a decisive close below the neckline (the line connecting the two intervening troughs). The inverse pattern — three troughs with a deeper middle and an upward neckline break — is bullish. The neckline break must come within 60 bars of the right shoulder — a pattern that lingers unbroken expires rather than firing on a late, far-extrapolated line cross. Among the most-watched and most-cited topping/bottoming patterns in classical chart analysis.

+1 when the close breaks up through the neckline of a confirmed inverse H&S; -1 on the downside neckline break of a standard H&S. The break must occur within 60 bars of right-shoulder confirmation — unbroken patterns expire.

+1 = bullish inverse H&S confirmed, -1 = bearish H&S confirmed.

When price comes within an ATR-relative band of a key moving average (typically 50- or 200-period) and reverses without closing through it, the MA is acting as support (in an uptrend) or resistance (in a downtrend). The cleanest trend-continuation entry — buy the pullback to a rising MA, sell the rally to a falling MA. The proximity band is sized as 0.5 × Wilder ATR(14), so a high-volatility name and a quiet utility get proportionally-scaled bands instead of a fixed percentage that fires constantly on one and almost never on the other. A rejection only counts when the prior 3 bars all traded clear of the band — price must approach the MA from a distance and get turned away; a stock simply riding along its MA does not fire. Failure of the rejection (a clean close through) is itself meaningful and often signals a regime change.

+1 when, after the prior 3 bars traded clear above the MA band, the bar's low tags the band and the close holds above the MA; -1 when, after 3 bars clear below the band, the bar's high tags it and the close stays below.

+1 = bullish MA rejection (support held), -1 = bearish MA rejection (resistance held).