Methodology

Pythia publishes a family of scores. Each one answers one question about a company, or about the market around it. This page says what each score tells you and how to read it. The Academy teaches the ideas behind them.

The scores

• PAS, Pythia Academic Score. How the business measures up on profitability, value, quality, momentum and growth, against companies of its own kind.
• PGS, Pythia Guru Score. How many of the tests set by well-known investors the company passes.
• PVS, Pythia Valuation Score. Whether the price today asks a lot of the company or a little.
• PCI, Pythia Company Index. Where the company stands overall among the companies we score.
• PBS, Pythia Behavior Score. How the market has been treating the stock.
• PMI, Pythia Macro Index. How supportive the economy, the market and the sector are.
• PI, Pythia Insight. A written reading of what the scores say together.

The five pillars

The Pythia Academic Score looks at a business from five sides. Each side has a score of its own.

• Profitability. What the business earns on what it has.
• Value. What the price buys, in earnings and in assets.
• Quality. How sound the accounts and the balance sheet are.
• Momentum. How the share price has been moving.
• Growth. How fast sales and earnings are growing.

How to read a score

• Every score runs from 0 to 100, and higher is better.
• Every score carries the date it was computed.
• A score describes a company. It does not tell you what to do.

Beside the numbers, Pythia prints words, such as a conviction or a view on valuation. Each word follows one rule, so it means the same thing wherever it appears.

What holds for every figure

• Sourced: every figure links to the filing, vendor record or document it came from.
• Dated: the date a value was true sits beside it, so nothing is stale without saying so.
• Comparable: a company is judged against companies of its own kind, so a bank is not measured against a chipmaker.
• Yours to arrange: you choose which figures matter on your dashboards, tables and screens.

What a score is not

A score is a rule applied to reported data. It is not a forecast, not a recommendation, and not advice. Any price shown as implied or intrinsic is a model scenario under stated assumptions. The record shows how the scores have fared against outcomes, including where they have not.