Z Squared Inc. (ZSQR) Stock Analysis
Z Squared Inc.
▾ What's in the 41/100 risk score? (higher = riskier)
Contributions (weight × component score) sum to the total. This near-term score now includes fundamental health (leverage, FCF trend). It excludes the the Altman Z score, whose retained-earnings input this filer does not report separately, which relies on a proxied (estimated) input. See the Financial Health section for the full balance-sheet read.
How to read ZSQR (speculative micro-cap)
No model can pin a precise fair value on a company this small — but that does not mean there is nothing to learn. The useful questions are what the price is betting on, and whether the company can survive long enough to deliver it.
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1
Reverse-DCF — what growth the price assumes ↓
The single most useful number here: it backs out the growth the market is paying for. If that figure is "historically unprecedented," the price is running on hype, not fundamentals.
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2
Cash runway ↓
A pre-profit micro-cap lives or dies on whether it can fund itself to profitability before running out of money and diluting you.
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3
The raw financial statements + the 10-K ↓
At this scale, the actual numbers, insider ownership, and share-count trend tell you more than any ratio.
Our DCF for ZSQR lands well below today's price. For a non-cyclical that usually means the market is pricing in growth far beyond recent cash flows (or there's a data quirk), so we don't headline a single fair-value number.
What to use instead: The Reverse-DCF shows exactly how much growth the price demands — decide whether that's realistic. Pair it with peer multiples.
This note is only about the single DCF fair-value number — ZSQR's full financial statements, health scores, and written analysis are all below.
How to read a company this small
ZSQR is too small and/or too volatile for the valuation lenses we use on larger, more stable companies. The numbers shown below should be taken as rough orientation only.
- Market cap $16.7M — nano-cap territory (below $50M)
- Latest annual revenue $1.4M — too small for meaningful growth percentages
Growth percentages on tiny revenue bases (1000% going from $200K to $2M is not predictive). P/E and ROE swing wildly with small earnings changes. Peer comparisons fail because there often aren't comparable companies at this scale.
Start with the Reverse-DCF above — it backs out the growth the price is betting on; if that figure is "historically unprecedented," the price is running on hype, not fundamentals. Then the cash runway (can it fund itself to profitability before diluting you?). Then the raw Financials table and the 10-K on SEC EDGAR — at this scale, insider ownership and the share-count trend often matter more than any ratio.
Classified as Speculative Nano / Micro-cap (confidence 80%). Disagree? An admin can override via the post edit screen.
⚠ Genuine comparables are scarce at this size, so peer multiples are unreliable here. Treat as rough context only — see 📍 What to focus on above.
How does ZSQR stack up against its closest peers?
We take the 6 same-industry companies most similar to ZSQR (similar size) and check what investors are paying for each dollar of their revenue (or profits). If ZSQR is much more expensive on the same yardstick, that's a red flag — unless you have a specific reason it deserves a premium. For a leveraged business, EV/EBIT and FCF yield (both in the table) are usually more reliable than EV/Sales, because revenue multiples ignore differences in margins and debt.
▾ What's "EV / Sales" in plain English?
EV (Enterprise Value) = market cap + total debt − cash. It's "what you'd pay to buy the entire company outright" — you pay the market cap to shareholders and take over their debt, but you keep their cash. EV is fairer than market cap alone because it includes the debt the new owner inherits.
EV / Sales = EV ÷ annual revenue. So "2.5×" means investors pay $2.50 of enterprise value per $1 of yearly sales. Higher = market is paying more per dollar of sales (usually because they expect future growth or fat margins).
p25 / median / p75 are the 25th, 50th (middle), and 75th percentile of the peers' multiples. Half the peers fall between p25 and p75. The median (p50) is the typical peer — that's the benchmark we compare to.
| EV / SalesEV / Sales — For every $1 of yearly revenue, this is how many dollars investors pay to own the whole business (including debt). Why it matters: Works for pre-profit growth companies where P/E and FCF don't apply. The most apples-to-apples cross-company multiple because it ignores accounting choices. Reference: 1–3x for mature companies · 4–10x for software/SaaS · 10–20x for hypergrowth · >20x is rare and demanding Full explanation → |
1.2x / 9.3x / 16.4x |
Bold middle number = median peer. Half the peers trade above it, half below. Computed over 6 same-industry peers; implausible multiples excluded.
⚠️ Important caveat: peer multiples only work if the peers are genuinely comparable. Always check the peer list below — if the auto-picker grabbed micro-caps or unrelated businesses, the comparison is noise. A medical-device giant priced against tiny biotech startups won't produce a useful signal.
▾ View peer list (8)
| Ticker | Company | Industry | Mcap | EV/Sales | EV/GP | EV/EBIT | FCF Yield |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MDBH | MDB Capital Holdings, LLC | Financial Services | $19M | — | — | 3.9x | — |
| TBH | Brag House Holdings, Inc. | Financial Services | $14M | — | — | — | — |
| ORIO | Orion Digital Corp. | Financial Services | $23M | — | — | — | — |
| MEGL | Magic Empire Global Ltd | Financial Services | $24M | 16.4x | — | — | 3.7% |
| GREE | Greenidge Generation Holdings Inc. | Financial Services | $25M | 1.2x | — | — | — |
| PAPL | Pineapple Financial Inc. | Financial Services | $28M | 9.3x | — | — | — |
| GRAN | Grande Group Ltd/HK | Financial Services ·fallback | $15M | 3.6x | 4.6x | 8.1x | 4.4% |
| SAIH | SAIHEAT Ltd | Financial Services ·fallback | $20M | 4.5x | — | — | 0.1% |
Quality & solvency checks
Cheap stocks can be cheap for a reason. These screens warn when a low valuation comes paired with structural fragility.
Why it matters: Cheap-looking stocks (low P/E or P/B) often have low Z-scores because the market knows the company is dying. Z-score warns you before you fall into a value trap.
Reference: > 3.0 = safe zone · 1.81–3.0 = grey zone · < 1.81 = distress zone
Full explanation →
We can't produce a trustworthy Altman Z here: retained earnings weren't separately reported in our data, so a core input would have to be fabricated. Rather than show a categorical "distress" verdict from an invented number, we mark it unavailable. The classic manufacturing-calibrated model also fits asset-light businesses like this one poorly. Judge financial health from the leverage, cash position, and the measurable Piotroski checks instead.
▾ The checks — what passed, what didn't (and what we couldn't measure)
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✗ Positive net incomeNet income -$11.9M in the latest year.Why this matters: Does the company actually earn a profit? Sustained losses eventually force it to raise money — diluting you — or take on debt.
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✗ Positive operating cash flowOperating cash flow -$8.6M (was -$6.6M the prior year).Why this matters: Profit can be an accounting figure; cash from running the business is harder to fake. Negative operating cash flow means the core business consumes cash and must be funded externally.
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✓ Cash flow backs up reported profitOperating cash flow -$8.6M vs net income -$11.9M.
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✓ Return on assets improvingReturn on assets -73.8% vs -119.9% a year ago.
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✓ Debt load (vs assets)Long-term debt is 0.9% of assets vs 1.7% a year ago ($0.2M now).
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✓ Short-term liquidity (current ratio)Current ratio 4.16x vs 0.23x a year ago.
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✗ Share count (dilution)Share count rose 120.0% (1.9M → 4.2M year-over-year).Why this matters: Issuing lots of new shares splits the pie into more pieces, shrinking your slice. Stable or falling share count protects existing owners.
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· Pricing power (gross margin) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
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· Sales per asset (asset turnover) (n/a — data not reported; not scored)
Missing data is never counted as a pass or a fail — it's shown as n/a and excluded from the denominator. Each check compares the company against its own prior year.
Plain English: the company holds about $6M in cash and is burning roughly $9M/year in operations. At that pace, the cash lasts 8 mo before it must raise capital (diluting shareholders), take on debt, or cut spending.
Assumes constant burn and ignores financing/asset sales. For pre-profit biotech and growth companies, this matters more than a DCF — a great drug pipeline is worthless if they run out of money before approval.
What if you assume different inputs?
Here's where we land — and what happens if you change the assumptions. Drag the sliders to set your own Discount RateDiscount Rate — The annual return you demand for taking single-stock risk instead of buying a safe Treasury or index fund.
Why it matters: Higher discount rate = stricter valuation (a stock has to produce more cash to be worth holding). Lower = more generous.
Reference: 8–12% is standard · 9–10% matches S&P 500 historical return · Below 7% is illogical for single-stock risk
Full explanation → (the annual return you demand for single-stock risk) and terminal growth; the value updates live so you can see whether the stock looks cheaper or richer. The discount rate starts at 10.0%, the figure our model used for ZSQR. Open Advanced to also change beta, growth and the rate path.
Note: no headline intrinsic value is published for this stock (the valuation is held for a data-quality reason — see the notes above). The calculator below is a what-if tool: the values it produces are your assumptions played out, not our estimate.
A full intrinsic value isn't shown for ZSQR because the valuation is currently held for a data-quality reason (see the guardrail notes above). The reverse-DCF reading still works — it needs only the price and cash flow — but we won't publish a forward value until the underlying data passes our checks.
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⚙ Advanced — tinker with every input (beta, growth, rate path, margin → full intrinsic value)
A standard discounted cash flowDCF — Discounted Cash Flow — sums up all future cash a business will produce, adjusted for the fact that future dollars are worth less than dollars today.
Why it matters: It is the most fundamentally honest valuation method when applicable — but only works for companies with predictable, positive cash flow.
Reference: Best for: mature, profitable businesses. Fails for: pre-profit growth, banks, REITs.
Full explanation → (DCF) valuation is not meaningful for ZSQR due to its negative operating cash flow and net income, indicating a cash-burning growth stage. Investors are likely betting on continued high revenue growth, which has been 106.5% annually over four years, to eventually lead to profitability. The market may be assigning value to the potential for new financial technology innovations or strategic partnerships, which are not captured in backward-looking cash flow models. The #1 quantifiable risk is the persistent negative operating cash flow, which could necessitate further capital raises.
As of 2 months ago
Anatomy of a share
What you're buying per share. Bars are at the same scale so you can see the relative size of revenue, costs, cash flow, and debt — not just read them in a table.
What's free cash flow / what do these mean?
Revenue per share — how much the business earns from customers, divided by the number of shares outstanding. Top of the income statement.
Earnings per share — profit left after operating costs, interest, and taxes, per share. Two versions appear on this page and are not interchangeable: GAAP diluted EPS uses the company's weighted-average diluted share count during the reporting period (this is the "earnings" in "price-to-earnings"); net income per current share divides annual net income by today's share count. They differ whenever the share count has changed.
Owner-earnings free cash flow per share — the cash the business produces for shareholders. Savng's owner-earnings FCF subtracts capital expenditures and stock-based compensation from operating cash flow (SBC is a real dilution cost even though it's non-cash). This is deliberately more conservative than "standard" FCF, which subtracts only capital expenditures — so our figure is lower than the headline FCF you'll see elsewhere. FCF funds dividends, buybacks, debt repayment, and acquisitions; a company can report positive earnings yet negative FCF.
Debt per share — total interest-bearing borrowings divided by shares. High debt-per-share next to thin FCF-per-share is a fragility signal.
What you actually need to decide
Every stock price is a disagreement. Here's the single thing that must go right for the bulls, the single thing that breaks the thesis, and the concrete signposts to watch so you can update your view as real results arrive.
- Acceleration or deceleration of revenue growth
- Improvement in gross margin from 86.7%
- Progress towards positive operating cash flow
The trend, in plain numbers (2024 → 2025)
Straight from the financial statements — no model, no opinion. For a small or unprofitable company, the direction of these numbers usually tells you more than any single valuation.
Nothing clearly improving year-over-year.
- Free cash flow is negative at -$8.6M — the cash burn widened vs last year.
- Still unprofitable at -$11.9M — loss widening.
Management & Leadership
Limited executive data available for Z Squared Inc. as a public entity. Typically, early-stage financial services firms are led by founders with expertise in finance or technology, driving product development and market penetration.
What They Make
Z Squared Inc. operates in the financial services sector. Without specific product segment data, it likely offers financial products or services to individuals or businesses, focusing on growth and market expansion.
End Markets
Revenue Drivers
Why Is It Priced Like This?
Why Customers Pay
What we use instead: earnings (P/E, EV/EBIT), book value (P/B) — computed from the figures this company does report, shown in the sections below. Those numbers are unaffected by the missing cash-flow data.
The market is pricing ZSQR based on expectations of continued high revenue growth, which has been 106.5% annually, rather than current profitability. The negative net income and operating cash flow indicate a focus on market share and product development. The market may be assigning value to future innovations in financial technology or the expansion into new high-growth financial service niches, which are not in the model.
Business Model & Valuation
How They Make Money
The company funds itself primarily through equity raises, given its negative operating cash flow and lack of dividends or buybacks.
Growth / Revenue DCF
Negative free cash flow: revenue/margin growth model used - standard FCF DCF is unreliable for companies still scaling.
Show advanced inputs
| RevenueGrowth | 50.0% |
What this model does NOT do: this is a consolidated owner-earnings FCF model. Standalone segment assumptions: none. It does not project net interest income and fee-income lines independently; their combined effect is embedded in the historical revenue and cash-flow trend the model extrapolates. The calculator above can only approximate a segment's impact through the single consolidated growth rate — it cannot model any one line separately. For a true segment-level view, build a separate model from the company's segment disclosures.
Maturity & Competitive Position
Moat Signals
Revenue is growing at 106.5%/yr over four years, from $0M to $1M.
Geography & Markets
Geographic mix data is not available from current data sources. As a financial services company, it likely operates primarily in its home market, potentially with aspirations for international expansion.
Geographic Risks
Market Signals
These are timing signals, not value signals — they describe the stock's recent price behavior, not what the business is worth. Use them for the "the thesis looks good, but is now the moment?" question. Each tile below explains what it's saying.
Why it matters: Short-term contrarian indicator. Extreme readings often precede mean reversion, though not always.
Reference: 30–70 normal · >70 overbought · <30 oversold
Full explanation → (14)38.9NeutralMomentum is balanced — neither overbought nor oversold.
Why it matters: When the fast line crosses above the slow line, short-term momentum is turning up; below, turning down. A timing cue, not a value signal.
Reference: Line above signal = bullish momentum · below = bearish
Full explanation →BearishLine below signalThe fast trend is below the slow trend — short-term momentum is currently downward.
Technicals describe price, not the business. A great company can have a "bearish" tape (a buying chance) and a weak one a "bullish" tape (a trap). Pair these with the valuation and health sections above.
QUALITY
Data Quality & Risk Flags (5 notes — click to expand/collapse)
Guardrail Notes (5)
- FCF negative: revenue/margin growth model projects future cash flows from revenue trajectory.
- Price is 7.6x model IV - market may be pricing optionality, narrative catalysts, or margin expansion beyond what trailing cash flows support.
- Illiquidity discount 7% applied (small/micro-cap — harder to exit, demand a margin).
- Extreme valuation: price is 8.2x the model IV ($1.13) and this is not a cyclical — output likely dominated by a data issue. Suppressed.
- DATA UNAVAILABLE: per-share values suppressed due to missing/unreliable shares data.
FINANCIALS
Financial Statements (5-year tables — click to expand)
From Z Squared Inc.'s SEC filings (EDGAR).
Income (5yr)
| Year | Revenue | Net Income | EPS |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | 1.4M | -11.9M | $-2.81 |
| 2024 | — | -10.7M | $-5.56 |
| 2023 | — | -21.3M | $-16.56 |
| 2022 | — | -37.6M | $-2.63 |
| 2021 | 75,000 | -13.4M | $-1.23 |
Cash Flow (5yr)
| Year | Operating CF | CapEx | − SBC & adj. | Free Cash Flow |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2025 | -8.6M | — | — | -8.6M |
| 2024 | -6.6M | — | 1.1M | -7.8M |
| 2023 | -7.2M | — | 477,503 | -7.7M |
| 2022 | -3.9M | — | — | -3.9M |
| 2021 | -4.5M | — | 1.9M | -6.4M |
How we define FCF: operating cash flow − capital expenditure − stock-based compensation (owner-earnings basis — SBC is a real cost to shareholders even though it's non-cash). This is the same owner-earnings FCF definition the valuation model uses, though the DCF's starting value is a projected from revenue × terminal margin, not this single year.
Balance Sheet
| Total Assets | 16.2M |
| Total Liabilities | 2.1M |
| Equity | 13.6M |
| Total Debt | 150,000 |
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