How the grade works.
Every step, published.

Every stock starts at 50 points — a C−. It then earns or loses points on six questions any careful investor would ask, using audited numbers from the company's own filings:

• Is revenue growing? Sales up more than 20% year-over-year earns the most points; shrinking sales lose points.
• Are profits growing? Same idea, applied to the bottom line.
• Is the debt manageable? Low debt compared to what shareholders own earns points; heavy leverage loses them.^*
• Does management earn a good return on your money? Return on equity — profit per dollar shareholders have in the company.
• Can it pay its bills? A healthy cash cushion against short-term obligations.^*
• What do professional analysts think? Price-target upside gets a small voice — deliberately the smallest of the six.

Add it up, cap it between 0 and 100, and map to a letter: 90+ is an A+, below 35 is an F. The same numbers always produce the same grade — no black box, no "the model felt bearish." Growth and profitability dominate, balance-sheet safety matters nearly as much, and market opinion gets a voice but never a veto. A company can't score an A on hype.

^*One published exception: banks and insurers. For a bank, borrowing is the business — deposits are its raw material — and its balance sheet isn't split into short-term and long-term the way an industrial company's is. So for companies in the Financial Services sector, the debt and bill-paying questions score a neutral zero instead of a penalty, and the grade's breakdown says so in plain words. Everything else is scored exactly the same, and a well-run bank can still earn an A+.

Want the exact point bands, straight from the production code? The complete algorithm is published on our engineering site: Anatomy of a Grade. Every grade in your dashboard also shows its own arithmetic — hover it and see which factors moved and why.

The grade never travels alone.

Alongside every letter grade you'll see independent signals computed separately, so one lens can't hide another: an ML health score (a machine-learned second opinion — when it disagrees with the grade, that disagreement is itself worth your attention), analyst sentiment from real ratings, and profitability badges — including a green "cash-positive despite losses" flag for companies running the deliberate-reinvestment playbook that accounting income makes look worse than it is.

Two style lenses sit beside the grade, too — each a 0–100 reading with its own breakdown. The value lens reads free-cash-flow yield, P/E against a 15× baseline, dividend yield and price-to-book; the growth lens reads revenue, net income and free-cash-flow growth. The letter grade stays one comparable scale for every stock; the lenses add the style context — a slow-growing cash generator can read "C+ grade, 92 value lens," and both numbers are telling you something true.

Every grade is computed from companies' own audited financial statements — the numbers they file with regulators, not estimates or third-party summaries. GMI computes its valuation and quality metrics in-house from those raw statements, with currency handling and validation rules applied at every step, so the figure on your screen traces cleanly back to the filing it came from. And when a number can't be computed to our standard, your report shows a "—" — never an approximation dressed up as a fact.

Full detail for the technically curious: Data Provenance & Accuracy — every source, every refresh cadence, every validation rule.