About Stocks Dashboards
Live answers to the questions investors ask about the stock market, built from public data and rebuilt every trading day.
What this is
Each page answers one question: a short answer, the number behind it, a chart of how it has changed and the table it comes from. Every page is rebuilt after each US trading day and shows the date it was last updated.
The site is built on Stox, a research dashboard for individual investors that ranks large US stocks on how their shares are performing and how their businesses are growing. Stox’s data, scores and research feed every page here.
How the answers are measured
- Against its own history. A market reading, such as how stretched the S&P 500 is, is scored from 0 to 100 against its own past, usually the last five years, or ten for economic data. A score of 90 means the reading is higher than on 90% of the days in that window.
- Against other stocks. A stock’s scores are percentiles against about 1,200 large US stocks and funds in the S&P 500, Nasdaq-100 and Russell 1000, where 100 is best.
- P3 score. Three scores combined: market beat (a year’s return against the market), staying power (how steadily the stock has held its rank, week to week) and business growth (revenue, margins and cash flow against a year earlier). It is a geometric mean, so a stock has to do well on all three to score high.
- Types. Those three scores and money flow (buying against selling, on volume) are each split at 50, which gives 16 types of stock, the same as Stox Atlas.
- Groups. Stocks whose prices have moved together over five years once the market’s own moves are taken out, rather than stocks that share an industry label.
- Typical daily move. The average true range over 14 days as a share of the price: how far the stock usually travels in a day, including overnight gaps.
Every page explains its own method at the foot, under “How to read this page”, and names its sources.
Where the data comes from
Prices are adjusted for stock splits. Company figures come from quarterly and annual reports.
What the readings can and can’t tell you
Most readings here describe the recent past. We test which of them have said anything about what came next, and pages say so when a reading hasn’t. In our research on S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 stocks since 2003:
- Stocks beating the market with a growing business have kept a small edge on average.
- Cheapness alone, whether by price to earnings, PEG, free-cash-flow yield or value combined with quality, has not reliably led to better returns.
- Buying stocks because they have fallen has not worked, even when the business kept growing.
- Changes in analysts’ ratings have not predicted returns. Earnings surprises have, modestly.
- Which sectors are leading has not been a reliable guide to which will lead next.
- Stress gauges such as the VIX say more about how bumpy the road ahead may be than about which way it goes.
Not advice
Everything here is general information about markets and companies. It is not investment advice, a recommendation to buy or sell anything, or a forecast, and it doesn’t take your circumstances into account. Past performance doesn’t predict future returns. Data can contain errors or arrive late, so check anything important against a company’s own filings.