What twenty years of filings actually show
We test our own signals in public, count each company once, grade against the right benchmark, and publish what does not work next to what does. Every piece links to the backtest behind it and to the stocks it points at today.
What works
Tested on the full record, with the sector breakdown.
Heavily shorted stocks fall more often, but the price chart already told you
Across every US stock over $100 million from late 2021 to mid-2026, 52% of heavily shorted stocks (more than 15% of shares sold short) fell 20% or more at some point in the next three month…
Dividend yield: a modest, real edge — until it gets extreme
Ranking payers by their declared yield at each annual report, higher yield beat lower yield over the next year. Above roughly 8% the market is usually right that the dividend is at risk.
Price-to-book still sorts, across all sizes
The oldest value signal there is. Ranking non-financials by price-to-book each year, the cheapest fifth beat the most expensive fifth over the following twelve months in most years, with th…
Cheap small caps on book value: the widest spread in our data
Among non-financial companies under $2 billion, the fifth cheapest on price-to-book at each annual report beat the most expensive fifth by a wide margin over the next year — and by more in …
When an insider raises their stake by 30% or more during a sell-off
The size of the commitment matters. Buys that raised the insider's existing holding by at least 30% are the strongest single signal we have found, and the Industrials cell was pre-registere…
Insider buying pays in sell-offs, not in calm markets
Copying every opportunistic insider purchase barely beats small caps when the market is calm. The same trades beat the market clearly when it is being sold off.
Cluster buys: three insiders, one week
Three or more insiders buying in the same ten-day window is the most quoted insider signal. It works, but mainly in stress, and the bank version of it works only in a panic.
Officer buys versus director buys
Named executives (CEO, CFO, president) buying their own stock carry a small, consistent edge in every market state. Directors carry more in stress and less in calm.
Ranking companies as equity bonds: the top fifth beats the bottom fifth by a wide margin
Treat each company as a bond whose coupon is its owner earnings, growing at a capped rate, and rank the universe by the ten-year return that implies. The top fifth beat the bottom fifth by …
The equity-bond lens works for steady compounders, barely for growers
Split by growth type, the ranking sorts steady names cleanly and moderate growers well. For fast growers the ten-year return leans on the growth assumption, and the lens loses most of its p…
What does not work
Negative results, published with the same care.
Insider selling does not warn that a company will fail
Comparing companies only with others of the same size, the ones whose CEO or chief financial officer sold shares in the past year went on to fail slightly less often (0.19% within a year) t…
Net-nets: the ratio does not sort, and the strict rule is a lottery
Ranking companies by net current asset value over price barely separates winners from losers. The strict Graham rule (price below net current assets) did return a high average, but on fewer…
Big dollar buys are the weakest insider signal we track
A $250,000-plus purchase sounds decisive. Across 9,000 of them it produced no edge in calm markets and a modest one in stress. Dollar size measures the insider's wealth, not their informati…
A first-ever insider purchase is not a signal in calm markets
We pre-registered the idea that a brand-new insider position in retail during a calm market would be informative. It was not. First purchases only matter when the market is already frighten…
Insider buying does not tell you a company will survive
Of 353 companies that later failed, 84% had insiders buying beforehand, and insider buying showed up in filings before a failure at nearly the same rate as everywhere else (49% against 42%)…
A 20%+ owner-earnings yield is the market disagreeing with the coupon
The richest-looking rows in the equity-bond table are almost never bargains. A yield above roughly 20% means the market expects the cash flow to shrink: a commodity peak, a business in run-…
Method notes
How the valuation handles structures that trip up a simple model.
A floor on the discount rate: a low beta does not make a stock as safe as Treasuries
Beta alone would give leveraged pipeline equity with a beta of 0.56 a 7.6% discount rate, barely above Treasuries. Our floor is the ten-year Treasury plus a four-point minimum equity premiu…
Holding companies: value the parent's share, not the whole group
Plains GP Holdings consolidates all of Plains All American, but its shareholders own a minority of it. Dividing the whole group's cash flow by the parent's share count would put a $202 valu…
Reading total debt when a company reports only the combined figure
Some companies, Air Products since 2023, report only one combined debt figure that includes the current portion. Reading just the current portion would show $716 million instead of $17.7 bi…
Evidence pages
The full tables behind the findings.
Evidence: every screen on the site, compared on one yardstick
Top fifth minus bottom fifth, twelve months ahead, versus the S&P 500 and small caps, with the market-state split, for every factor we screen on. The Screen Lab lets you test any other comb…
Evidence: the owner-earnings backtest in full
Every table behind the equity-bond ranking: quintiles, growth types, sectors and years, with the method and its limits.