Where the numbers come from
- Company filings with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC EDGAR): annual and quarterly reports, results releases, insiders’ Form 4s and funds’ 13Fs.
- Prices from licensed market data (Twelve Data) and CoinGecko for crypto.
- Economic figures from FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), the EIA, the CFTC and FINRA.
- Members of Congress’s trades from the House Clerk’s and the Senate’s disclosure sites. When the Senate’s site turns us away, the app says when its trades were last updated.
Fair value
We value each company several ways from its filings: the cash it makes, what its shares have usually cost, and what the market pays for similar businesses. Those are combined into one fair value, with a range and how sure we are of it.
A fair value is an estimate, not a price target. Research services often land 20% or more apart on the same company, and the app shows each method’s figure so you can see where ours comes from.
The PreOpen Score
Every company gets a score from 0 to 10, built from five parts:
- 40%
- Where it ranks on value and quality together, among the S&P 500 companies we value
- 20%
- Its price against its fair value
- 20%
- The quality of the business: its returns, margins, growth and financial strength
- 10%
- What its chart shows
- 10%
- What investors are doing: insiders, short sellers, money flowing in or out
A price far above its fair value holds the score down, however well the company ranks. Scores read Strong from 7.0, Positive from 5.5, Mixed from 4.0 and Weak below. They describe what we measured, not what to do.
How often it updates
Ratings are worked out again after each US close and each morning, and every page says which close they are made to. US prices update every minute or two while the market is open.
Stories
Our newsroom follows official sources (company filings, statistics offices, central banks) and news outlets around the clock. When something material happens, AI writes the story from the sources it read in full, and names and links them under it. Every story is checked against our data and those sources before it is published. How we use AI.
Smart money
Insiders’, funds’ and members of Congress’s trades are shown as they were filed. Each Congress trade says how many days after the trade it was disclosed, because a trade made public a month later is old news.
What a rating is not
- Not advice. No rating says to buy, sell or hold anything.
- Not personal. Everyone sees the same ratings. None knows your aims, finances or taxes.
- Not a forecast. Ratings are measured from the past and cannot see what comes next.
This is method 3.8, in use since 5 November 2026. The full method, every weight and every change since launch are in the app, under Research → Our method.