Description
The fundamental task in investing is finding mispricings in price v. quality. There are a lot of cheap companies in the market, but most of them are cheap for very good reasons. The trick is finding companies that are cheap but actually healthy. In 2000, Joseph Piotroski wrote a paper in which he described a mathematical model that turned data from financial reports into a simple 9-point score that described a company’s health. He showed that this score, combined with a valuation metric (he used Book-To-Market), could be used successfully to produce excess returns in an investing strategy. This stock screener finds all companies with a score greater than six (which we call “healthy enough”). In his work, he suggested taking a list like this and buying the cheapest of that list. Note that many people believe, incorrectly, that buying companies with the best score is the proper approach, but they end up overpaying for quality. Remember, the goal is to find mispricings in price and quality, not overpay for high quality.