Every stock is priced by a handful of measurable factors.
Factor investing is measuring those factors and owning the stocks the evidence favours. This page explains the factors Ticker Nerd scores on roughly 4,600 US-listed stocks every trading day — and how they become one rank.
A factor is a measurable trait tied to future returns.
A factor is something you can measure about a stock today that has been linked, over long histories, to how it performs later. How cheap the stock is against the profits behind it. Whether the price is already moving. Whether analysts are raising their forecasts or cutting them.
The research is public and decades deep: Fama and French tied cheapness and company size to returns in 1992, Jegadeesh and Titman documented momentum in 1993, Novy-Marx tied persistent profitability to returns in 2013. The findings have been argued over in the open ever since — and they are still standing.
None of the factors below are ours. We implement what the published research found; we did not discover it.
The factors Ticker Nerd scores.
Read live from the ranking system on 1 Aug 2026— which families exist, and what each one measures. Every stock the model covers is scored 0–100 on each, against every other stock.
Revisions
Analysts move their forecasts in steps rather than all at once, so the direction they are currently moving tends to continue.
What it looks at Which way analysts are moving their numbers, and how fast.
Value
Buying a business for less per dollar of what it earns and owns has paid off over long periods, partly because the market over-reacts to bad news and extrapolates gloom too far.
What it looks at What the shares cost against the profits, cash flow and assets standing behind them.
Momentum
Prices tend to keep drifting in the direction they have been heading, because news spreads through the market slowly rather than all at once.
What it looks at How the shares have performed over the past months, next to every other stock.
Quality
Businesses that earn good, durable profits on the capital they use tend to keep doing so, and the market consistently under-pays for that persistence.
What it looks at How much profit the business earns on the capital it uses, and whether it holds up year after year.
Accruals
Profit that has not yet arrived as cash tends to reverse, and companies that expand their asset base fastest tend to disappoint afterwards. This is the forensic check on the others — it catches a business that only looks cheap or profitable because of how its earnings were counted.
What it looks at How much of the reported profit actually arrives as cash, and how fast the company is expanding its asset base.
Issuance
Management tends to sell shares when it thinks they are dear and buy them back when cheap, so the direction of the share count carries information — and buying back stock signals capital discipline.
What it looks at Whether the share count is growing or shrinking, and how much the company leans on outside financing.
Growth
A business getting bigger and more profitable is worth more than the same business standing still — and what matters most is whether the rate of improvement is itself speeding up, because that is the part the market has usually not priced yet.
What it looks at Which way sales and profits are heading, and whether the pace is picking up or fading.
Size
Smaller companies have historically returned more than larger ones, because fewer professionals follow them closely and less-examined businesses are more often mispriced. It is also why several holdings will be names you have never heard of.
What it looks at How large the company is against everything else the model tracks.
Volatility
Steadier share prices have historically delivered better returns per unit of risk taken.
What it looks at How violently the share price moves in ordinary weeks.
The factors become one score.
Every trading day, the factor scores combine into one number per stock: the Ticker Nerd Rank. A rank near 100 means the evidence lines up well across the families; a rank near 0 means it lines up badly.
The weights sit close to even on purpose. Every factor has had bad years, and leaning hard on one is a guess about which works next — the exact guess this method exists to avoid.
The engine underneath is an institutional-grade backtesting platform running more than twenty years of history — on any past date the model sees only what an investor could have seen that day. Rules that only work with hindsight die there.
The rank covers roughly 4,600 stocks; the portfolio built on it chooses from a stricter, rule-built set — about the 1,500 largest and most liquid. Those eligibility rules, and the research process end to end — the locked test windows, the stress battery, the logged rejections, and the strategies that failed on the way — are documented on the methodology page.
Every stock page shows the rank and the factor scores behind it, free.
What factor investing does not do.
- It does not predict the market. A factor model stays invested; there is no cash call and no view on rates.
- It has bad years. Every factor has lagged the market for stretches, sometimes years at a time, and a model built on them will too.
- It cannot see what has not been filed. A buyout, a fraud, a court ruling — none of these show up in the fundamentals before they happen. Price often moves first, and momentum reads some of that early drift, but only once the move is underway, and it never says why.
The Market Radar explains one of these factors every Monday, with the week’s highest and lowest scorer as live examples.
Membership is the Ticker Nerd 20 — the portfolio the rank is built into.