Every weekday after the market closes, the Vance Value Screener ranks about 1,200 US companies on four questions a value investor asks: is it cheap, is it a good business, is it safe, and has the selling stopped? This page explains each of those, how the answers become one rank, and what that rank can and cannot tell you.
01 / WHO GETS RANKEDThe universe.
A company is ranked if it files financial statements with the SEC, trades on a US exchange, and clears four floors:
- a share price of at least $3;
- a market value of at least $300 million;
- at least $2 million of stock traded on a typical day;
- at least a year of price history and a recent quarterly filing.
Banks, insurers and REITs are left out. The measures below compare a company's price with its operating business, and a bank's balance sheet is its business, so the comparison does not describe it. A company missing too much data to score is reported as unranked, not quietly dropped.
02 / LIKE WITH LIKEScored against its own sector.
Every measure is turned into a percentile within the company's sector, from 0 to 100, where 100 is the best reading in that sector today. A software company is compared with software companies, a trucker with truckers. Ten times earnings is cheap for one industry and expensive for another; comparing within the sector keeps that from deciding the ranking on its own.
03 / CHEAPNESS · 40%Is it cheap?
The largest weight, because this is a value screen. Price is measured against the whole business, using enterprise value: the market value of the shares, plus debt, minus cash. That way a company can't look cheap just by carrying a lot of debt.
- Enterprise value / operating profit (EBIT, last twelve months)
- Enterprise value / free cash flow: operating cash flow minus capital spending
- Enterprise value / revenue
- Shareholder yield: dividends plus buybacks, as a share of market value
A company losing money or burning cash gets the worst score on the matching measure, not a pass. A value screen that lets loss-makers skip the price test is not a value screen.
04 / QUALITY · 30%Is it a good business?
Cheap stocks are often cheap for a reason. This pillar keeps the broken ones from rising to the top.
- Gross profit / total assets: how much the business earns on what it owns
- Return on invested capital
- Accruals: whether reported profit is backed by cash coming in
- Change in gross profitability from a year earlier
05 / SAFETY · 20%Can it get through a bad stretch?
- Net debt / EBITDA; a company with more cash than debt scores best
- Interest cover: operating profit over interest owed
- Net share issuance: whether the company is diluting its holders
- Working capital and retained earnings, each over total assets
06 / CONFIRMATION · 10%Has the selling stopped?
- 12-1 momentum: the return over the past year, leaving out the latest month
- Price against its 200-day average
The smallest weight on purpose. It is there to stop the screen buying into a fall that has not finished, not to chase a rally.
07 / ONE NUMBERFrom four answers to a rank.
Each pillar's score is the average of its measures' percentiles. The four are then weighted into one score out of 100:
40% Cheapness + 30% Quality + 20% Safety + 10% Confirmation
Companies are ranked by that score, and ties go to the safer company. To be scored at all, a company needs at least half the measures in every pillar.
08 / AN EXAMPLEYelp, on the close of September 21, 2026.
The business was priced at about three times its free cash flow, returned 27% of its market value to shareholders in a year, earned about 25% on invested capital and carried no net debt. The one measure against it was the price: down about a quarter over the year. That trade-off is visible on every company's page, so you can see what put it where it is. See where Yelp ranks today.
09 / WHAT TESTING FOUNDA filter, not a forecast.
The rules above were written down before they were tested, and the test results are published whether or not they flatter the screen. We ran the ranking month by month from 2017 to 2025, on about 1,000 companies at a time.
- The ranking was ordered. Higher-ranked groups did better than lower-ranked ones, fairly consistently.
- Most of that came from the bottom. Over six months, the lowest-ranked tenth trailed the typical company by about 11 points at the median. The top tenth was only about level with it.
- In the most recent two years, the edge largely disappeared.
- The test could only see companies still listed today, which flatters any result.
A high rank is a reason to look, not a reason to buy.
What the screen does well is put the numbers that matter for every company in one place, compared fairly with its own industry. It is better at telling you what deserves a closer look — and what deserves caution — than at picking winners.
10 / TIMING AND DATAWhen it updates, and where the numbers come from.
The screen runs every weekday at about 7:15 PM Central, on that day's closing prices, so in the morning the site shows the previous day's close. Financial figures come from companies' own filings in the SEC's Financial Statement Data Sets, and may lag a filing made in the last few days. Prices come from Nasdaq.