Glossary
Stock research glossary — key metrics & terms
Plain-English, answer-first definitions of the metrics behind StoqPulse's scoring, screening and risk analytics — each grounded in the full guides and put to work in the app.
- Piotroski F-Score
- A 0-9 grade of a company's fundamental health, introduced by Stanford accounting professor Joseph Piotroski, that awards one point for each of nine pass/fail accounting signals across profitability, leverage/liquidity, and operating efficiency. A score of 7-9 signals strong, improving financials while 0-2 flags weak or deteriorating ones, so it works best as a screening filter rather than a buy signal.
- Read the Piotroski F-Score guide →
- Altman Z-Score
- A single number, developed by NYU professor Edward Altman in 1968, that estimates how close a company is to bankruptcy by blending five balance-sheet and income-statement ratios into one score. Above 2.99 is the 'safe' zone, 1.81-2.99 is the inconclusive 'grey' zone, and below 1.81 is the 'distress' zone associated with elevated failure risk.
- Read the Altman Z-Score guide →
- Value at Risk (VaR)
- An estimate of how much a portfolio could lose over a chosen horizon at a given confidence level; a 1-day 95% VaR of $4,000 means losses would not be expected to exceed $4,000 on 95% of days. It is a loss threshold, not a worst case, so it says nothing about how deep losses go in the tail beyond the cutoff.
- Read the Value at Risk guide →
- Conditional VaR (CVaR)
- Also called expected shortfall, CVaR is the average loss in the tail beyond the VaR threshold, capturing how severe the worst days get rather than just how often they occur. It is always larger than the matching VaR, making it the better gauge when tail severity is what you care about.
- Read the VaR & CVaR guide →
- A measure of risk-adjusted return — a portfolio's excess return over a risk-free rate divided by its volatility — so a higher Sharpe means more return earned per unit of risk taken. StoqPulse computes it on your actual holdings using annualised volatility against a 4% risk-free rate.
- See risk analytics →
- Beta
- A measure of how much a stock or portfolio moves relative to the overall market: a beta of 1.0 tracks the market, above 1.0 amplifies its swings, and below 1.0 dampens them. StoqPulse computes it against SPY by aligning both return series to the same trading dates and taking covariance over variance, and flags market risk when beta exceeds 1.30.
- See risk analytics →
- CAGR
- Compound annual growth rate — the smoothed, constant yearly rate at which a value would have grown from its start to its end over a period, stripping out the noise of individual years. StoqPulse reports it as a headline backtest metric and as multi-year dividend growth.
- See the backtester →
- Margin of Safety
- The gap between a stock's estimated intrinsic value and its market price, calculated as (Intrinsic Value − Price) / Intrinsic Value, which Benjamin Graham insisted on so errors in your assumptions don't sink you. Many value investors require 25-50% for less predictable businesses and less for stable, high-quality firms.
- Read the intrinsic value guide →
- Yield on Cost
- A dividend metric that divides a stock's current annual dividend per share by your original purchase price rather than today's price, showing the income yield on the capital you actually invested. It rises over time as a company grows its dividend, even when the current market yield stays flat.
- See the dividend tracker →
- Composite Stock Score
- A single 0-100 rating, often shown as an A-F grade, that blends several independent factor groups — typically quality, value, growth, and momentum — so stocks can be compared on the same rubric. StoqPulse blends Fundamentals, Technical, Sentiment, and Macro components at default weights of 60/20/10/10, dropping and renormalising any component whose data is missing.
- Read the composite score guide →
- Intrinsic Value
- An estimate of what a business is fundamentally worth based on the present value of all the future cash it can generate for owners, independent of today's market price. It is a model output rather than a fact — change the assumptions and the answer changes — so a stock may be undervalued when intrinsic value sits well above price.
- Read the intrinsic value guide →
- Discounted Cash Flow (DCF)
- A valuation method that estimates intrinsic value by projecting a company's future free cash flows, discounting each back to today at a required rate of return, then adding a terminal value for cash flows beyond the forecast window. The terminal value routinely makes up 60-80% of the total, so the discount rate and perpetual-growth assumptions dominate the result.
- Read the DCF guide →