The Ziggma Stock Score
Sorts Winners From Losers.

The Ziggma Stock Score is a proprietary 0–100 stock rating that evaluates publicly traded companies on fundamental quality across four pillars: growth, valuation, profitability, and financial health. It is designed to help long-term investors compare stocks based on data rather than analyst hype or broker incentives.

The score is peer-relative — a company is ranked against relevant industry peers, not a one-size-fits-all benchmark. A score of 83 means the company ranks in the upper tier of its peer group across all four pillars combined. It appears alongside every holding in the Portfolio Checkup and across the stock screener.

The score combines over 40 financial indicators across four pillars — growth, valuation, profitability, and financial health. Some indicators are industry-specific: leverage thresholds for a bank differ from those for a software company, so the model applies the right metrics for each sector.

The exact weighting of indicators is proprietary, but the framework is transparent: each pillar is scored separately, then combined into a single 0–100 number. Companies are benchmarked against true industry peers, so a score always reflects relative strength within a relevant competitive set — not a raw absolute number.

Yes, across the score's full history. Every covered US stock priced at $5 or above — roughly 2,400 companies at any moment — was sorted into one of four score ranges at each month-end and held for the following month, using only the score published before that day's market open. The test runs from January 2022, when Ziggma began publishing the score, to June 2026.

Returns rose at every step of the ranking. Equal-weighted, the four ranges returned −1.2%, 2.2%, 4.8% and 7.4% a year. Volatility fell from 24.0% to 20.2% across the same four steps, and maximum drawdown improved from −40.8% to −25.7%. Against the same universe held with no score filter, the top range added 3.4 percentage points a year.

Weighted by company size, as an index is, the top range returned 15.7% a year against 12.1% for the S&P 500.

Hypothetical backtested results. They do not represent actual trading, no client account achieved them, and past performance does not guarantee future results.

In smaller companies, where analyst coverage is thin and fundamental quality is less likely to be reflected in the price already. Compared within size bands, stocks scoring 75–100 below $2B in market capitalisation beat their size peers by 7.0 percentage points a year in backtesting.

Above $10B the advantage narrows to 0.9 points, which is not statistically distinguishable from zero over a sample of this length. The score still ranks large companies consistently — it simply has less to add where dozens of analysts already cover the name. That makes it most useful in the stock screener, where under-followed companies surface that would not otherwise reach a watchlist.

The score runs from 0 to 100 and maps to five bands:

0–20 Low Weak fundamentals relative to peers.
20–40 Below Average Stronger peers exist across most pillars.
40–60 Average Mixed profile with room for improvement.
60–80 Strong Above-average fundamentals, favorable peer ranking.
80–100 Excellent Top-tier quality signals across all four pillars.

The bands are not arbitrary. Because the score is a percentile rank, roughly a quarter of covered companies fall in each quarter of the range at any moment. In backtesting, each higher quarter returned more than the one below it, with lower volatility and shallower drawdowns.

A portfolio-level score is the weighted average of all holding scores. See how to interpret and act on portfolio-level metrics for the full framework.

No. The Ziggma Stock Score is a research and portfolio-quality signal, not a price target, short-term trading signal, or buy/sell recommendation. A high score means a company has strong fundamentals relative to peers — it does not predict short-term price movement or guarantee future returns.

It is best used as a starting point for deeper research and as a portfolio quality layer: identifying which holdings are fundamentally strong and which are dragging the average down. The decision to buy, hold, or sell is always yours. Ziggma is not a broker and earns nothing from trades — see how the Portfolio Checkup surfaces score-based insights across your holdings.

Growth — measures whether the company is expanding in a durable way, capturing revenue, earnings, cash flow, operating profit and tangible book value growth trends.

Valuation — assesses the company's price relative to peers using earnings yield, sales-to-market-cap, EV multiples, and operating metrics. A company can score well on growth but poorly on valuation if the market has already priced in all the upside.

Profitability — captures return on equity, return on assets, EBITDA margin, and other profitability metrics, including industry-specific ratios where relevant.

Financial Health — evaluates leverage, liquidity, and debt-servicing ratios that signal long-term resilience. A company growing fast but taking on unsustainable debt will score lower here regardless of its growth score.

The four pillars together prevent a single impressive number from hiding weakness elsewhere — see how to analyze a stock portfolio using multi-factor scoring.

Scores are recalculated daily and computed before the market opens. Valuation inputs move with prices; fundamental inputs refresh as companies report, so the profitability and financial health pillars turn over on the quarterly earnings cycle.

A meaningful score change — typically a shift of 10 or more points — usually signals a material change in a company's fundamentals or its peer group's performance relative to it. It is worth reviewing holdings that drop sharply in score, particularly if growth or financial health is the driver.

There are three main use cases:

Portfolio quality check — run a Portfolio Checkup to see the weighted average score across all holdings. A score below 50 typically means a handful of weak holdings are dragging the portfolio down. The checkup surfaces the lowest-scoring positions so you know exactly where to focus.

Screening for replacements — when a holding scores poorly, use the stock screener to find higher-scoring alternatives in the same sector. This keeps sector exposure stable while improving the portfolio's average quality.

Pre-trade modeling — before adding a new position, use the Portfolio Optimizer to see how the trade would affect the portfolio's overall score, beta, and diversification before it's placed.

Yes — and this is one of the more useful combinations for investors trying to align financial quality with values. The Ziggma Score surfaces fundamental quality; the Impact Score surfaces real-world alignment across climate action, fair labor, and accountability. The two are calculated independently, so a stock can score well on both, on neither, or on just one.

In practice, combining a minimum Ziggma Score filter (say, 60+) with a climate or impact filter in the screener surfaces companies that are both financially strong and values-aligned — without having to run two separate processes. See how climate impact is measured for how the impact side of that combination works.

The Ziggma Stock Score is designed for individual equities, where peer-relative fundamental analysis is most meaningful. ETFs are scored differently — using their own metrics such as expense ratio, yield, and underlying index characteristics — rather than via the four-pillar framework built for company fundamentals.

For a portfolio that mixes individual stocks and ETFs, the Portfolio Checkup surfaces scores for equity holdings alongside ETF-level data, so you can assess the quality of the stock sleeve specifically rather than averaging it with fund-level figures.

The quality ETFs — QUAL, SPHQ, VFQY — screen on profitability and balance-sheet strength. Neither contains a growth input nor a valuation input, so they cover roughly two of the Ziggma Score's four pillars. A company can rank highly in any of them while growing at 2% and trading at 40 times earnings.

The Invesco S&P 500 GARP ETF (SPGP) is the closer match, covering all four pillars in a single product. It holds 75 large-cap positions selected only from the S&P 500 and rebalances twice a year. Over the same backtest window it returned 6.8% a year against 15.7% for the top Ziggma Score range.

The wider difference is structural. Any ETF gives you one fixed portfolio. A score covers every company we follow, updates daily, and can tell you whether a stock you already own is fundamentally sound.

Broker analyst ratings — Buy, Hold, Sell — are produced by firms that also earn revenue from investment banking, trading commissions, and order flow. That creates a structural conflict: analysts at full-service brokers have historically issued far more Buy ratings than Sell ratings, regardless of underlying fundamentals.

The Ziggma Stock Score has no such conflict. Ziggma is not a broker, earns nothing from trades, and receives no placement fees. The score reflects what the fundamental data shows about a company relative to peers — nothing more. It is a starting point for research, not a conclusion shaped by who pays for it.