/us-undervalued-growth-screener

Scoring Rubric, Evidence Quality, Penalties, and Gates — v3.5

1. Philosophy

Use two independent dimensions:

1. Investment score — attractiveness of the company and return setup.
2. Data-quality score — whether the evidence is sufficient to trust the investment score.

A high investment score never overrides missing evidence. A candidate below the configured data-quality floor is review_required, not rankable.

2. Raw Investment Score — 100 Points

A. Growth Sustainability — 20

Assess:

• two- to three-year revenue and per-share growth visibility,
• durability of drivers,
• organic versus acquisition growth,
• customer/product concentration,
• forecast breadth and plausibility,
• sector-specific lifecycle or cycle risks.

Guide:

• 17–20: durable 20%+ per-share growth or exceptional 15%+ visibility.
• 13–16: credible mid-teens growth with manageable risks.
• 8–12: growth exists but is volatile, concentrated, or fading.
• 0–7: weak or unsupported growth.

B. Valuation Attractiveness — 20

Assess:

• same-basis current/forward multiple,
• standard and SBC-adjusted FCF yield,
• own-history and peer comparison,
• constant-multiple upside,
• 20% contraction resilience,
• value-trap risk.

Do not award a high score merely for low trailing P/E.

C. Financial Quality and Capital Efficiency — 15

Assess:

• ROIC/sector return metric,
• margins and operating leverage,
• usable corporate cash,
• net leverage and refinancing risk,
• goodwill/intangible burden,
• resilience under stress.

D. FCF and Earnings Quality — 15

Assess:

• correctly reconstructed standard FCF,
• OCF versus net income,
• working-capital quality,
• standard versus company-adjusted FCF gap,
• SBC-adjusted economics,
• accounting red flags.

E. Competitive Advantage — 10

Assess:

• switching costs,
• network effects,
• brand/data/regulatory moat,
• recurring revenue,
• customer retention,
• market-share durability.

F. Capital Allocation, SBC, and Dilution — 10

Assess:

• actual net share change,
• buyback price discipline and funding,
• SBC burden,
• acquisition returns and impairments,
• debt repayment and reinvestment quality.

G. Catalyst / Risk Balance — 10

Assess:

• catalyst timing and probability,
• identifiable route to estimate delivery,
• downside asymmetry,
• measurable invalidation conditions,
• reason not to buy now.

2A. Broad-Screen Guidance Versus Hard Gates

Broad-screen growth and preferred valuation thresholds are guidelines. Store isolated misses in guideline_misses; they reduce priority or trigger a near-miss review but do not automatically reject a company.

Selection-eligible patterns include:

• preferred forward valuation plus credible per-share growth,
• P/E 21–30 with 20%+ per-share growth,
• attractive P/E and mid-teens per-share growth even when headline revenue growth is below the preferred range,
• strong cyclical growth/valuation combinations that require mid-cycle normalization.

Hard broad failures are reserved for severe conditions such as non-positive standard FCF when applicable, negative ROIC, excessive leverage beyond the hard limit, extreme forward valuation unsupported by growth, or negative revenue and per-share growth.

sector_review_required is selection-eligible when the remaining work is nonblocking cyclical normalization. Missing bank/REIT/BDC/MLP valuation or auto-dealer floorplan-adjusted leverage remains blocking and produces needs_enrichment.

3. Evidence-Derived Data-Quality Score — 100

The evaluator awards points only when fields and resolving source IDs pass. Self-attested completeness flags are ignored.

Default minimum: 70. A score of 100 means deterministic evidence checks passed; it does not guarantee the thesis is correct.

4. Deterministic Penalties

Penalties subtract from the raw 100-point investment score.

Data-quality penalty

The minimum-quality gate may still prevent ranking regardless of penalty.

Cyclicality penalty

Missing required normalization is also a review blocker.

Estimate breadth

Use the minimum analyst count among available year-2/year-3 metrics.

Estimate dispersion

Use the maximum normalized low/high spread among future periods.

SBC / revenue

Annualized diluted-share growth

Net share reduction is not inferred from a buyback authorization.

Liquidity

• Below preferred dollar-volume threshold but above hard floor: 2 points.
• Below hard floor: hard exclusion as extreme illiquidity.

Sector-specific risk

Current deterministic examples:

• Commercial biopharma with top-product concentration ≥50% and nearest material LOE within five years: 2 points.
• The same condition with LOE within three years: 4 points.

Missing required sector evidence causes review rather than a silent neutral score.

5. Gates and Statuses

excluded

Hard exclusion includes:

• inactive, delisted, or suspended symbol,
• pending or completed M&A/special-situation pricing,
• OTC, penny stock, shell/SPAC, or development-stage economics,
• repeated financing dependence,
• unresolved restatement/material weakness/SEC investigation,
• meme-only thesis,
• extreme illiquidity,
• invalid special-case valuation basis.

screened_out

Use when the security is valid and active but does not satisfy the broad economic screen. Preserve reasons and sources.

review_required

Examples:

• stale quote/event mismatch,
• stale or unresolved corporate-action preflight,
• TTM/capex reconstruction failure,
• mixed GAAP/adjusted periods,
• forecast bridge or required reconciliation failure,
• data quality below threshold,
• missing cyclicality normalization,
• missing sector-critical evidence,
• insufficient constant-multiple upside when configured,
• materially conflicting supplied multiple.

eligible

All hard and review gates pass. Eligible does not mean “buy”; it means the candidate may be compared and ranked.

6. Run-Level Ranking Status

• final: run metadata says complete and no symbols remain unprocessed.
• provisional: partial run or non-empty unprocessed list.

A provisional report may show completed candidate calculations, but final_three must remain empty.

7. Confidence Labels

• high: eligible, data quality ≥85, analyst breadth ≥5, and no major unresolved caveat.
• medium: eligible with data quality 70–84 or analyst breadth 3–4.
• low: eligible only under an exception or with fragile estimates.
• not_ranked: review-required, screened-out, or excluded.

8. Sorting and Tie-Breaking

Sort eligible candidates by:

1. final score,
2. data-quality score,
3. preferred three-year constant-multiple upside,
4. lower cyclicality,
5. symbol for deterministic stability.

Final selections use separate lenses:

• highest conviction: final score, data quality, confidence,
• most undervalued: SBC-adjusted FCF yield and lower current multiple,
• largest upside: preferred three-year constant-multiple upside.

9. Schema-v3 Quality Caps

The lowest applicable cap wins.

These caps prevent unsupported 90–100 quality scores.

10. Forecast-Horizon Rankability

• Current formal valuation: NTM or FY1.
• A consensus future horizon normally requires at least three analysts.
• A one- or two-analyst horizon is supplemental unless a sourced independent model passes the forecast bridge.
• A candidate must have at least one rankable two- or three-year horizon.
• TTM multiples, unsupported outer-year estimates, and mixed metric bases cannot satisfy the 30% upside gate.

11. Run-Level Finality

A final ranking requires:

run_metadata.status = complete
unprocessed_candidates = []
screening_audit.valid = true
screening_audit.runtime matches installed v3.6 fingerprint
screening_audit.candidate_pool.generation_audit.valid = true for bounded pools
screening_audit.enrichment.candidate_pool_exhausted = true
screening_audit.enrichment.unresolved_count = 0
screening_audit.enrichment.queue_count = 0
screening_audit.enrichment.all_rows_resolved = true
contract.valid = true

A full-market no-candidates conclusion additionally requires full in-scope economic coverage. A bounded-pool no-candidates conclusion must be explicitly scoped to the audited bounded pool and requires at least one economically assessable row. Attempt counts and evaluable-count thresholds cannot replace pool resolution.

The CLI --require-final returns exit code 2 otherwise. Diagnostic files are still written for the repair loop.

12. v3.5 Formal Eligibility Quality Gate

Passing the 30% base-case upside test is necessary but not sufficient. A formal eligible name must satisfy all configured floors:

A candidate with one or two ordinary failures may be labeled conditional. A candidate with more failures, severely weak FCF support (for example SBC-adjusted yield below 1% or EV/FCF above 50x), or severe LOE downside is review_required.

Category-specific final selections

final_three categories may be null. Never force the sole eligible name into every label.

• Highest conviction: score ≥75, DQ ≥80, stress upside ≥0.
• Most undervalued: SBC-adjusted FCF yield ≥5% or EV/FCF ≤20x.
• Largest upside: supported low-consensus-case upside ≥20%.

If no ranked candidate meets a category threshold, render 確認できず / not verified.