This page explains where the numbers on StockVane come from, how often they update, and which figures are calculated by us rather than taken directly from a data feed.
Update frequency
- Price quotes refresh roughly every 8 seconds while the U.S. market is in its regular trading session, roughly every 45 seconds during pre-market and after-hours trading, and roughly every 15 minutes while the market is closed.
- Financial statements, valuation history, dividend records, ownership, and short-interest data are refreshed on a rolling basis across the tracked list rather than all at once, so a given company’s fundamentals are typically up to about a week old.
- Analyst consensus, ratings, and news headlines follow the same rolling refresh as fundamentals.
- Daily price charts (candlesticks) are maintained separately and can occasionally lag by about a day depending on upstream data availability; the live price shown at the top of each page is not affected by this.
Data sources
Quotes, financial statements, ownership, dividend, and analyst data are sourced from licensed, brokerage-grade market data feeds. StockVane does not independently verify each figure against a company’s original filings before publishing it; where a number looks wrong, please let us know so it can be checked.
What we calculate ourselves
Most figures on a stock page are shown exactly as reported by the underlying data feed. A handful of figures are calculated by StockVane from other reported numbers rather than being pre-computed upstream:
- Enterprise Value is calculated as market capitalization plus total debt minus cash.
- PEG ratio is calculated as the trailing P/E ratio divided by the company’s trailing three-year net income growth rate. Forward (analyst-estimate) earnings growth is not available in our data, so this is a trailing PEG, not a forward PEG, treat it accordingly.
- Altman Z-Score is calculated using the original 1968 five-ratio formula from reported balance-sheet and income-statement figures. It is a general bankruptcy-risk heuristic, most reliable for industrial and manufacturing companies, and considerably less meaningful for banks, insurers, and other financial companies, whose balance sheets don’t fit the model’s assumptions.
- Valuation percentile (shown on the Valuation tab) compares a stock’s current P/E, P/B, or P/S ratio against its own trailing five-year range, not against other companies.
- Peer comparison (shown on the Valuation tab, where available) lists other tracked companies that share the same primary industry classification, ranked by market capitalization.
Coverage universe
StockVane tracks a fixed list of roughly 100 U.S.-listed companies, reviewed periodically rather than continuously. See the About page for more on what’s covered.
Prices and splits
Prices, historical candles, per-share figures, and 52-week ranges are adjusted for stock splits, so a split does not create an artificial jump in the chart. A price that looks far from what you remember is usually explained by a split since you last checked.
Limitations
Data can be delayed, incomplete, or occasionally incorrect. Company descriptions and headline text are aggregated automatically and are not independently fact-checked line by line. See the disclaimer for the full terms of use.
Quant-labeled features
The “Quant”-labeled reads shown on stock pages are computed by a StockVane algorithm running entirely on data already described elsewhere on this page (price history, valuation history, analyst consensus and rating changes, capital flow, short interest, institutional ownership, and the Altman Z-Score). They are rule-based composite scores, not generated by a live AI/language model, and no external AI service is called to produce them – this is disclosed here in the interest of transparency about how the “Quant” label is used.
- Quant Rating: the StockVane Momentum signal (A–E; hero badge on every tab). Each trading day every covered stock is ranked by its trailing 12-month price return and checked against its own 200-day moving average, producing one call: A Strong Buy, B Buy, C Hold, D Sell, E Strong Sell. A = among the ~12 strongest names trading above their 200-day average (the model portfolio); B = momentum in the top 30% and above the 200-day average; D/E = below the 200-day average (E adds bottom-15% momentum); C = everything else. The model portfolio holds the ~12 “A” names inverse-volatility weighted, scaled to an ~18% annualised volatility target, and moves fully to cash whenever the S&P 500 is below its own 40-week (200-day) average. The 12-month momentum ranking needs 252 trading days, and daily price history starts around September 2021, so the model holds only cash for its first year (which also kept it out of the 2022 sell-off) before trading normally. Reconstituted weekly; a holding is dropped straight away if it loses its 200-day average.
- How it is tested. The track record page runs this rule set every trading day since September 2021 and compares the result, total return and worst drawdown, against the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 (both total return). That history is a backtest on the ~100 US stocks StockVane covers today; a real-money result going forward is very likely to be weaker. Returns assume weekly rebalancing, 0.08% per trade, no slippage and no taxes. Nothing here is investment advice, and the rules may change: the version in force is stamped on the track record page.
- Quant Sentiment (Bullish/Neutral/Bearish, -100 to +100; Overview tab) blends recent price momentum, main-fund capital flow over the trailing weeks, the trend in short interest as a percentage of float, and the analyst consensus tilt. Reflects recent, already-public market activity, not a StockVane opinion.
- Quant Technical Outlook (Bullish/Neutral/Bearish; Overview tab) is a classic technical-analysis read comparing the latest price against its 20-day and 60-day moving averages. Describes a historical price pattern only, not a forecast or price target.
- Quant Fair Value (implied $ range; Valuation tab) takes the stock’s own trailing 5-year average P/E and its +/-1 standard deviation band, and multiplies each by trailing EPS to get an implied price range, compared against the current price. Skipped for stocks whose own P/E history is volatile enough that the low end of the band would imply a nonsensical (zero or negative) price.
- Worked example (Fair Value). If a stock's own five-year average P/E is 22 with a standard deviation of 4, and trailing EPS is $6, the implied range is 18×$6 to 26×$6, i.e. $108–$156, midpoint $132. A current price of $120 would sit in the lower half of that band.
- Quant Analyst Revision Trend (Improving/Deteriorating/Mixed; Analysts tab) tallies upgrades vs. downgrades among the stock’s tracked analyst rating changes. Requires a real margin (not a 1-count edge on a near-even split) before calling it decisively one direction, and explicitly flags when the single most recent change runs counter to the broader trend rather than letting the two appear to contradict each other.
- Quant Ownership Signal (Accumulating/Distributing/Mixed; Ownership tab) reads the direction of the most recent period’s change in institutional ownership – primarily the percentage of shares held by institutions, falling back to the change in the number of reporting institutions when the percentage move is negligible.
- Quant Financial Health (Good/Fair/Weak; Financials tab) buckets the Altman Z-Score into its standard textbook zones (below 1.8 = distress, 1.8-3.0 = grey zone, above 3.0 = safe) – most reliable for industrial/manufacturing companies, less meaningful for banks, insurers and other financials.
All of these are recomputed from the latest data on each page load, carry no guarantee of future performance, and are not investment advice – see the disclaimer.