Three quick screening scores on the Fundamentals card. Quality reflects how profitable a company is, Growth how fast its sales and earnings are growing, Value how cheap it looks on earnings. Each is color-coded green when strong, red when weak. They are simple heuristic screens, not probabilities.
Quality Score — how profitable the company is. It blends return on equity (profit earned on shareholders’ money) and profit margin (share of each sales dollar kept). Higher is better; roughly green in the low-20s, red in single digits. It says nothing about debt.
Growth Score — how fast it is growing. It blends recent revenue and earnings growth. Higher is faster; green around the low double digits, red once negative (shrinking). Backward-looking and can be lumpy year to year.
Value Score — how cheap it looks on earnings. Based on the P/E ratio, flipped so a lower P/E scores higher. A high Value Score means the stock is cheap relative to earnings (very roughly, a P/E under about 30 scores green). Cheap is not automatically good.
The three often pull in opposite directions, and that tension is the useful part. A wonderful business (high Quality, high Growth) is usually expensive, so its Value Score is low. A very high Value Score can mean the market expects trouble — the classic value trap. Use the trio to see the trade-off a stock offers, not to pick a winner from any single number.
Not always. A high Value Score means a low P/E — cheap relative to earnings — but a stock can be cheap because the market expects trouble ahead (a value trap). Read it alongside Quality and Growth.
High-quality, fast-growing companies are usually expensive: investors pay a premium, which shows up as a high P/E and therefore a low Value Score. The three scores are meant to be read together.
Browse all S&P 500 tickers to see this metric applied to individual companies.
Educational research only — not investment advice.