Everyone explains the famous investing rules. Almost nobody runs them. These articles take one rule at a time and measure what it actually does across the 844 companies SageRanks tracks in 30 indices, including the results that do not flatter the method.
The standard framework asks for three things measured over time. We can approximate one and a half of them at a single point. 206 of 801 companies clear both bars, the sector pattern says more about accounting than advantage, and 15 of them are there because of a missing line in a spreadsheet.
Read the measurement →A P/E of 20 is expensive for a bank and cheap for a software company. Medians and quartiles for eleven sectors across three regions, because the single number everyone publishes hides the useful part: technology spans 17.6 to 48.9 between its quartiles, financial services only 11.9 to 19.1.
Read the measurement →Graham let his P/E and price-to-book limits offset each other, as long as the two multiplied stayed under 22.5. Running that across 844 companies: 103 pass both limits alone, 184 pass with offsetting, and 81 are rescued by a single sentence. The sector table underneath is the part that does not flatter the method.
Read the measurement →If you are after definitions rather than measurements, the glossary defines every metric we use, the methodology page lays out the weightings and the deviations we know about, and each of the five lenses has its own page below.