Stock Ratings

Of the 300 stocks StockVane runs through its quant rating, 13 carry an A. That’s 4.3% of the coverage list, averaging a score of 98 out of 100. At the other end, 38 carry an E, averaging 7.3. The scale runs from 0 to 100, not the 0-to-10 shorthand the tool’s own label once suggested, and the shape of where those 300 names actually land says as much about the rating as the methodology page does.

I pulled the most recent snapshot for every covered ticker to see what an A actually costs and what a D actually looks like next to it, because a single-number score invites a kind of trust a letter grade does not always deserve on its own. Two names in the data broke the pattern in a way worth walking through before you treat any grade here as a clean summary.

Most quant screens on other sites hide this kind of check behind a paywall or a black-box description that says “proprietary” and stops there. StockVane’s version at least shows its work: 22 named factors, six named categories, and a raw score you can pull alongside the letter. That transparency is what makes an audit like this one possible in the first place, and it is also what makes the two exceptions below worth flagging rather than ignoring.

Two exceptions in three hundred names is not evidence of a broken tool. It is a reason to check the number.

What the score is actually built from

The composite comes from 22 factors, grouped into six weighted categories. It updates from live market data, and when a factor is missing for a given ticker, our research process guide covers the broader habit this reflects: the tool excludes what it cannot compute and rebalances the remaining weights rather than guessing, which is the right default but means two stocks with an identical final score are not always built from an identical mix of inputs underneath it.

Data lag is the other caveat built into the tool itself: figures can run several minutes to several hours behind the live tape depending on the factor. For a momentum input like 5-day price change, a few hours rarely changes the picture. For something that moves within a session, an earnings-day price swing, say, the score you see at 9 a.m. can already be stale by the closing bell. None of that shows up in the letter grade either; it only shows up if you check the timestamp.

Momentum carries the most factors of any category, five of the 22, which tells you this is a tool built to react to price action and analyst sentiment as much as it is built to judge a balance sheet. Profitability and financial health carries eight, the largest single group, covering margins, returns on equity, and balance sheet ratios like the current and quick ratios. Valuation, by contrast, gets only three factors, trailing P/E, price-to-book, and price-to-sales. A cheap stock on paper can still score poorly overall if momentum and profitability pull the other way, and that is by design, not a flaw to work around.

The rebalancing rule matters more than it sounds like it should. Fifty-six of the 300 covered stocks pay no dividend at all, roughly a fifth of the list. For those names, Growth & Income becomes a two-factor category, revenue growth and EPS growth splitting the weight that a dividend payer spreads across three. A non-payer never gets penalized for lacking a yield; it simply lets its other growth numbers carry more of the final score than they would at a company that also pays a dividend. That is a reasonable design choice, but it means the category weights printed on the methodology page describe the default case, not every case.

Where the 300 actually sit

The distribution is not a bell curve. Grade D is the single largest bucket at 93 names, 31% of the list, and grade A is the smallest at 13. Read the averages alongside the counts and the picture sharpens: B-grade names average 82.9, C-grade names average 54.2, a wide gap that suggests the letter bands are not evenly spaced across the numeric scale. Getting from a D to a C takes a smaller score improvement than getting from a C to a B does, at least based on where today’s 300 actually cluster.

The composition of that top bucket is its own signal. Eleven of the 13 A-grade names, SanDisk, Micron, Lumentum, Dell, Intel, Western Digital, Seagate, AMD, ASE Technology, UMC, and Marvell, are semiconductor or storage hardware companies. That is not a coincidence of what the methodology rewards; it is what a heavily momentum-weighted score produces when one sector is running hot at the same time. A tool with five of its 22 factors tied to price momentum will crowd its top grade with whatever industry the market is currently paying up for, which is useful information about sentiment and not the same thing as a statement about which businesses are strongest.

The letter and the number do not always agree

Here is the part worth checking before trusting a grade on its own. Strip out two names and the D bucket runs cleanly from a score of 4 up to 69, comfortably below where C-grade scores start. Vertiv and Vale do not fit that pattern. Vertiv carries a D grade with a score of 89. Vale carries a D grade with a score of 71. Both numbers would look at home in the B or C range everywhere else on this list, yet the letter says D for both.

Vertiv’s case is the stranger of the two. Its score fell to 63 on September 15, then climbed to 89 by September 20 and has held there since, a jump of 26 points in five trading sessions. I checked the news feed for a catalyst, an upgrade, an earnings beat, something. I did not find one large enough to explain a move that size; the stock itself rose only a few percent over the same stretch. I read this as a case where the numeric score moved faster than whatever recalibrates the letter boundary, though I cannot confirm that mechanism from the data available to me. Vale’s mismatch looks different: its score of 71 has sat unchanged for days, so whatever keeps it in D despite a C-or-better number is not a timing artifact at all.

Two names out of 300 is not evidence the tool is broken. It is evidence that the letter grade is a summary, and summaries lose information the raw number keeps. A stock screener built on the raw score would have caught Vertiv; one built only on letter grade would have filtered it out entirely.

What a grade tells you and what it does not

None of this is a forecast. The methodology page says so directly: not investment research, not a recommendation, educational only, and that disclaimer earns its place here. A high score describes where a stock sits today against 21 other factors and its own recent price behavior. It says nothing about what happens after the next earnings report, and a stock can hold an A grade for months before a single bad quarter drops it several letters at once. Treat the score as a starting filter for further reading, not a substitute for it, the same way our guide to tracking money moving into and out of the market treats flow data as a starting point rather than a signal to trade on by itself.

The bottom of the list makes the same point from the other direction. Oracle carries a score of 1 right now. Netflix carries a 2. Neither company is going out of business, and neither number is a comment on either franchise; it reflects where each stock sits on valuation and momentum measures at this specific moment, against a peer set that currently looks cheaper or is moving in a more favorable direction on the factors this tool tracks. A well-known name with a strong balance sheet can carry a low score for a stretch and still be a perfectly reasonable holding for a reason this particular tool was never built to capture.

The two numbers I would check before trusting one letter

Pull up the actual score, not just the letter, before acting on either. Then check how many days it has held there. A D that has read 71 for a week is telling a more stable story than a D that jumped 26 points in five trading days, even though both show up identically on a screen that only prints the grade.

A stable score, even a low one, describes a company the market has settled on for now. A score that just moved sharply, in either direction, describes a company the market is still arguing about, and that argument is the more useful thing to read before you act on the letter attached to it. Neither reading tells you who is right. Both are more information than the grade alone.

Financial disclaimer: The content on StockVane is for educational and informational purposes only and should not be construed as professional financial advice. Stock market investing involves risk of loss.

Sources: Dividends (SEC Investor.gov glossary) (https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/investing-basics/glossary/dividend) · Dividends tax topic (IRS) (https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc404)