SageRanks is not a black box. This page documents exactly how every ranking on this site is computed — each metric, each weight, each hard limit — so you can judge the tool instead of trusting it blindly.
On top of the ranking, each mode applies hard limits — absolute thresholds the investor himself insisted on. Breaching one doesn't change the rank, but flags a warning on the company so the breach is impossible to miss.
Warnings are graded by how far past the limit the company is. The bands are our own editorial choice, applied identically to every mode and metric:
For lower-bound limits (such as Buffett's gross margin > 15%) the distance is measured the inverted way — how far below the bound the value sits — and a non-positive value always counts as the worst band. Each warning's level is written out in text alongside the colour, so the grading works without colour vision.
Every index page also offers a strict screen toggle (off by default): it hides the companies that break any of the mode's hard limits and re-ranks the qualifiers among themselves. Sometimes nothing qualifies — that is not an error, it is the screen doing its job. Fisher mode has no strict toggle, because Fisher set no numeric limits: he trusted judgment, not rules. The same limits also power Passing the screen — live cross-index lists of every company that clears each legend's criteria right now.
| Metric | Better when | What it tells you |
|---|---|---|
| P/B | Lower | Price relative to book value — the classic margin-of-safety measure. |
| PEG | Lower | P/E divided by earnings growth — what you pay for each unit of growth. |
| ROE | Higher | Return on equity — how efficiently the company compounds shareholder capital. |
| Gross margin | Higher | Pricing power. Durable high margins are the fingerprint of a moat. |
| Revenue growth | Higher | Top-line momentum — the raw material of every growth story. |
| Analyst upside | Higher | Distance from current price to the mean analyst target. |
| Buy % | Higher | Share of analysts rating the stock a buy. |
| Score deviation | Lower | Disagreement between analysts — lower means a firmer consensus. |
| Beta | Lower | Volatility versus the market — a rough stability filter. |
| RSI | Closest to 50 | 14-day momentum. Near 50 = neither overbought nor oversold. |
Buy with a margin of safety, wait for fair value. Price relative to hard book value is everything; growth stories and analyst opinion are noise.
P/B ×4PEG ×2Beta ×2High return on equity and durable pricing power reveal a moat. Pay a fair price for quality rather than a bargain price for mediocrity.
ROE ×4Gross margin ×3PEG ×2Beta ×1PEG is the master metric: growth is only worth buying when the price hasn't caught up with it. Revenue growth and quality confirm the story.
PEG ×4Revenue growth ×3ROE ×2Upside ×1Score deviation ×1Buy% ×1Find companies growing faster than the market believes, with the margins to fund their own expansion. Fisher held winners for decades — no hard limits, conviction over rules.
Revenue growth ×4Upside ×3Gross margin ×2Buy% ×2Score deviation ×1RSI ×1Buy good businesses (high return on capital) at cheap prices (high earnings yield) — and nothing else. SageRanks approximates the formula's two pillars with ROE and PEG at equal, maximum weight.
PEG ×4ROE ×4Market data comes via Yahoo Finance and is refreshed by our pipeline roughly every 15 minutes on trading days. Open pages re-fetch automatically every 5 minutes while visible, so what you see is minutes old at most during market hours. Fundamentals are trailing (TTM) figures and update on the providers' own cadence.
Rankings are relative. #1 means best within that index, by that philosophy — not a buy signal. A deep-value #1 in an expensive universe is merely the least expensive.
Sector bias is real. Graham's P/B rule structurally punishes asset-light businesses (software, pharma) and flatters banks and industrials. Compare within sectors mentally, or use multiple modes.
Analyst data lags. Targets and ratings are updated by analysts on their schedule, not ours. Fresh news moves prices before it moves consensus.
Approximation, not replication. The modes translate each investor's published principles into today's data — Greenblatt's actual formula uses EBIT/EV and ROIC, which we approximate with PEG and ROE. The spirit is faithful; the letter is adapted.