Built to narrow ~3,000 companies down to a shortlist worth researching.
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3,459 companies shown · 1,579 excluded for incomplete data
Mean and median are close — no small group is dominating this metric.
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Of 1,938 companies we can judge on returns against their cost of capital, 183 (9.4%) earn more than they pay for money. 1,131 do not.
Return on invested capital against the company's own cost of capital.
How much reported profit turns into cash.
Leverage, interest coverage and liquidity, tested against a downturn.
The growth today's share price already assumes, worked backwards from cash flow.
The whole Q1 distribution by quarter, as a share of the companies we could judge, against the 10-year Treasury — click a band to isolate it.
Bands are the four verdicts in the key above, stacked to 100% of the 1,553–1,845 companies judgeable each quarter — so this shows the MIX changing, not the count. The strong band has sat between 6.1% and 12.1% for five years. What movement there is runs against the 10-year yield (r = −0.56 over the 19 quarters after the first), which is partly mechanical: the yield is an input to the hurdle each company is measured against. The first quarter judged 1,553 companies against 1,631 the next and sits at the edge of the backfill — including it moves that correlation to −0.13.
Every company we hold fundamentals for is put through the same four questions, from its own SEC filings. 5,626 were examined and 4,025 produced at least one answer. The four are kept separate and never combined into a score — a business can be excellent and priced for perfection at the same time, and one number destroys exactly that.
A blank is not a gap. Return on invested capital against cost of capital is not a meaningful test for every business, and the engine declines rather than inventing one — bank: 394, reit: 212, insurer: 104 carry no answer to the first question for that reason alone. Elsewhere the usual cause is no positive free cash flow, which a reverse-DCF cannot value.
Market-cap bands are the conventional boundaries, not quantiles: a quantile band moves as the market moves, so “large caps” would mean something different each quarter and the chart could not be compared with itself.
Verdicts are recomputed weekly · last run 2026-10-24 · config 2026.10.20. Screen on these in the screener.
How much of all corporate profit is earned by just 10 companies?
1,562–3,526 companies per quarter across 59 quarters · 3 provisional · the faded tail is thin, not a trend — recent quarters keep filling in for months as later filings restate them
Of every dollar of profit produced by companies that produced any, this is the share taken by the 10 largest. Companies with negative profit are excluded from both sides, because letting one big negative shrink the denominator would push the share above 100%. It can therefore approach 100% in a small or badly hit group — which is what the share-profitable line is for. Across the whole market this is not a coverage artefact: the cohort doubles over this window, but a fixed top-500 cohort tracks the same shape within 2.6 points.
ROIC across the whole market — not one number per quarter, but the whole spread of 129–3,503 companies.
The shaded quarters on the right are still filling in — recent filings keep arriving for months, so those points are thin, not a trend.
Each quarter is a snapshot of every company at once, not a single number. The dark band holds the middle half of the market: a quarter of companies sit above it, a quarter below. The light band holds 80%. The line is the median — the company in the exact middle.
A widening band means the market is spreading out — the same median with more dispersion means winners and losers are pulling apart, which a single line would hide completely.
Why no average or standard deviation. These distributions have long tails and several cross zero. A market P/E includes companies earning almost nothing, so an average is set by a handful of extremes rather than the market: measured across 58 quarters, the raw average P/E ran 3 to 32 times the median and swung between adjacent quarters while the median barely moved. A standard deviation is worse — it is inflated by exactly the outliers it claims to summarise, and because these distributions are not bell-shaped, “average ± 1 SD” does not contain the 68% of companies people assume.
Percentiles have no such problem. They are positions in a sorted list, so one absurd value moves them by one rank at most. For ROIC in the whole market even a trimmed average sits 0.314 interquartile ranges from the median — too far to draw beside it without misleading you, so it is not offered here.
Quarters marked provisional are still filling in — recent filings keep arriving for months, so the newest points are thin rather than meaningful.
Of the 2,414 companies with positive free cash flow in 2015, how many compounded it for 10 years — against what the market prices today.
The market is pricing 329 companies for free cash flow growth of 25%/yr or more. Over 2015–2025, 4.6% of companies managed it — 110 of 2,414.
The obvious way to ask “how many companies grew free cash flow at 15% a year for 10 years?” is to look at the companies that are still around and count. That answer is wrong, and always too high, because the question has already thrown away everything that failed.
Survivor rate divides by the companies still filing with positive free cash flow at the end. Corrected rate divides by everyone who started — counting the companies that went cash-flow negative, were acquired or stopped filing as the failures they were for anyone holding them. Over 2015–2025 the cohort went from 2,414 companies to 1,172 survivors, so the two differ substantially.
The chart draws the corrected rate. The survivor rate appears in the tooltip and the table beside it, never on its own.
Companies we cannot judge — no recent successful filing fetch, so an absence might be our gap rather than their failure — are excluded from the cohort entirely rather than counted as deaths (0 here).
Where does every $1 of revenue actually go — and how has that shifted since 2012?
1,562–3,526 companies per quarter across 59 quarters · 3 provisional · shares of the market's total revenue, summing to 100% · the faded tail is thin, not a trend — recent quarters keep filling in for months as later filings restate them