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Guide

The three Scores

The top of each card shows three summary scores. They run from −100 (looks weak / sell signal) to +100 (looks strong / buy signal). Zero means neutral.

  • Fundamental Score — built from the four core business measures: Financial Health, Profitability, Growth, and Valuation. Answers: is this a fundamentally sound business at this price?
  • 🔒 Full Score — combines all the ratings: the four fundamentals plus Hype, Analyst Upside, all the Trend signals and Insider Track. Better for: when should I buy or sell?
  • 🔒 Custom Score — your own mix. Tap the row to choose which ratings to include. The score stays hidden until you upgrade.

Free users see the Full Score and Custom Score blurred next to the Fundamental Score — the actual values appear once you upgrade.

On ETF / fund cards (silver-trimmed) the top score is called Composition Score instead of Fundamental — same place, same shape, but built from things that matter for funds (expense ratio, diversification, tracking quality). See the "Funds & ETFs" section below.

What each rating means

A long bar = the signal is strong (either positive or negative). A short bar = it's close to neutral. Tap any rating below for the full explanation.

Financial Health Fundamental

How sturdy the company's balance sheet is — debt levels, ability to pay short-term bills, and how well it could survive a recession or a bad year.

A high score means low debt and healthy cash reserves. A low score warns that the company might struggle if conditions get tougher.

Profitability Fundamental

How much of each pound of revenue actually ends up as profit (margins), and how well the company uses shareholder money (return on equity).

High = an efficient money-maker. Low = revenue comes in but profits don't (high costs, intense competition, or low pricing power).

Growth Fundamental

How fast the company's revenue and earnings are growing year-over-year.

High = the business is getting bigger. Low or negative = sales and profits are shrinking.

Valuation Fundamental

Whether the price looks reasonable relative to the company's earnings, book value and cash flow.

Cheaper than peers = positive score; more expensive than peers = negative. A great company can still be a bad investment if you pay too much for it.

Hype Sentiment

How much attention this stock is getting compared with its usual level — measured from Reddit, Stocktwits, news mentions and Wikipedia pageviews.

A spike in Hype often comes before a price move. But it can also be a warning sign that retail enthusiasm is running ahead of the fundamentals.

Analyst Upside Pros' view

Where professional analysts think the price should go — their average 12-month price target compared with today's price.

Positive = analysts think the stock is undervalued. Negative = they think it's already above where it should be.

Trend signals Technical

Read from the stock's recent price chart using standard technical indicators (moving averages, RSI, MACD, Bollinger bands). They tell you whether momentum is up, down or stalling.

The front of the card shows Year (the long-term trend). Premium also adds Day / Week / Month on the back — used for fine-tuning buy/sell timing.

🔒 Insider Track Premium

What's happening behind the scenes: executives and directors buying or selling their own shares, upcoming earnings, SEC filing clusters, and corporate events.

Insiders often act on information before it's public, so heavy insider buying can be a leading signal that the team itself is bullish on the company. Heavy insider selling is the opposite.

Tap to see the actual numbers

Each rating is built from a handful of underlying signals. Rows with a small chevron on the right can be expanded to show what's behind them.

  • The raw numbers — actual values (e.g. P/E ratio 32.1×, Reddit mentions 240) with a ▲ / ▼ showing whether the stock is better or worse than its sector's average for that signal.
  • A plain-English explanation — how the rating is built and which direction is good.
  • 🔒 5-year history · sector ranking — Premium add-on: see how each underlying signal has moved over time, plus exactly where the stock ranks within its sector.

The chevrons sit quietly in the background so the rating bars stay the main read. Tap once to expand, tap again to close. Tapping inside an open panel won't flip the card.

Funds & ETFs (silver cards)

An ETF (Exchange-Traded Fund) is a basket of many stocks or bonds you can buy as a single thing. Funds like QQQ, VOO, and VEU are how most beginners spread their money across hundreds of companies at once, without picking each one individually.

StockDecks shows ETFs as silver-trimmed cards so you can spot them at a glance. They appear alongside stocks in search and watchlists — look for the small ETF pill next to the ticker.

The card layout is the same as for stocks, but the ratings are different — tap any of these to learn more:

Composition Score

The top score on every ETF card — the equivalent of Fundamental Score on stocks. Built from how cheaply the fund is run, how diversified it is, how much it holds, and how closely it follows its index.

Expense ratio

What the fund charges you to hold it, every year — usually a small percentage (e.g. 0.03%). Lower is better.

This is the single most important number on any ETF. Fees add up year after year — a fund charging 1% will quietly take £1,000 from a £100k pot every year, whether the market is up or down.

Yield

How much income (dividends from stocks, or interest from bonds) the fund pays out, shown as a percentage of its price.

Income-focused funds (bond ETFs, REIT ETFs, dividend ETFs) have high yields. Growth-focused stock ETFs have low ones — the return comes from price going up, not income.

AUM (Assets Under Management)

How much money the fund manages in total. A bigger fund is usually easier to buy and sell, and more stable.

Very small ETFs (under £50m AUM) can shut down — leaving you with an unexpected tax bill and the hassle of finding a replacement.

Diversification

How many different things the fund holds.

A broad index ETF like VOO holds 500+ stocks — if one blows up, it's a tiny dent. A niche ETF might hold just 20 — more concentrated, higher risk if one of its top holdings runs into trouble.

1-year return

How the fund has performed over the past year.

Useful context, but past returns aren't a guarantee of future returns. Use it to compare similar funds, not as a buy signal on its own.

Volatility (beta)

How wild the ride is, compared with the overall market. Shown as a number called beta.

1.0 = moves with the market. 0.2 = much calmer (typical of bond ETFs). 3.0 = much wilder (leveraged ETFs).

Trend signals (Year)

The same as on stocks — read from the fund's recent price history to give you a one-glance read on whether momentum is up, down or sideways.

🔒 Tracking quality Premium

How closely the fund actually follows the index it's supposed to track.

Tight tracking = the fund is doing its job. Loose tracking = the fund is drifting from what it claims to follow — usually because of fees, sampling errors, or (in leveraged ETFs) daily-reset decay.

Tap any ETF card to flip it for Top holdings (the actual stocks inside — tappable to open their own cards), Sector and Geography breakdowns, and Performance vs benchmark.

Leveraged 3× — a red pill at the top-right of a card means the fund uses leverage (e.g. 3× or −2× the underlying). These are not buy-and-hold investments — daily resets cause "volatility decay" that quietly eats returns over time, even when the underlying rises. Use only if you understand the mechanics.

What's on the back of each card

Tap the front of any card to flip it. The back shows:

  • Top contributors — The three ratings doing the most to push the Score up or down for this stock, with their direction (▲/▼) and individual values. Drawn from all the ratings — not just the fundamentals.
  • Trajectory · 3 months — A small line chart of how the Score has moved over the last 3 months or so. Green and rising = the rating has been improving; red and falling = it's been weakening.
  • More from the data — Extra ratings not shown on the front (like Dividend yield and the average analyst recommendation), each with its own bar.
  • 🔒 Buy-timing detail — Premium users see Day, Week and Month trend signals here, plus a heads-up callout when the short-term signals disagree with the longer-term one — often the most useful timing clue.
  • Methodology link — Opens the general approach behind any rating, so you can sanity-check what's driving a Score. The overall method is documented; the exact weights stay private.

Navigating the deck

  • Swipe right to move to the next card · swipe left to go back. Upcoming cards peek behind to the left.
  • Tap the front card to flip it. The back shows why the score is what it is — top contributors, the 3-month trajectory, and extra data.
  • Tap a peeking card to bring it forward.
  • 🔒 Locked rows reveal short-term timing detail, Insider Track and Custom Score values — unlock with a Premium subscription.

Compare cards side-by-side

Each card has a small Compare pill in its bottom-right corner (look for the gold-bordered checkbox). Tap it to add that card to your comparison set — tap again to remove.

How to make a comparison

Add 2 or more cards from any watchlist or from search. The Open compare pill at the bottom of the page lights up gold once you've added at least two — tap it to see your picks side-by-side, every rating lined up in rows for easy A/B reading.

Mix across watchlists and across stocks + ETFs

You can pull from any watchlist (e.g. Tesla from one of your decks + Microsoft from another) and even mix stocks with ETFs (NVDA vs QQQ, to see how NVIDIA looks against the tech ETF).

If a rating only applies to one type, the other side shows . The winner tally only counts rows where both sides have a real value.

Your comparison set stays as you navigate around — browse, add and review without losing track.

Your watchlists ("decks")

A watchlist is a saved list of stocks you want to follow. StockDecks calls them decks because they look like decks of playing cards.

Making a watchlist

From any card, tap the share / actions sheet and choose Add to watchlist. Pick an existing deck or create a new one. The card sits in that deck until you remove it.

You can also build a new deck from the All decks page (drawer → All decks), where each row shows a deck's stats and how the average score is moving.

Switching between decks

The deck name at the top of the home page is tappable — switch between any deck you've made. Swiping left/right works inside the active deck only.

Where your data lives

Watchlists are saved on this device — they don't sync between phones and laptops (yet). Use Account → Your data → Export backup to save a file you can restore on any other device or browser.

The Sectors page

The U.S. market is split into 11 broad sectors — Technology, Healthcare, Financials, etc. The Sectors page lets you see which areas of the market are leading and lagging.

What you can do here

The overview shows every sector with its recent performance (Week / Month / Year). Tap any sector to drill in for its top stocks, the main ETF that tracks it, and (with Premium) deeper context: where money is moving, valuation vs history, and which sectors move together.

Mock Trading (practice with fake money)

Build a practice portfolio with fake money. No real broker, no real account — a safe space to learn how a portfolio behaves and try out the ratings without putting anything at risk.

How it works

Pick a starting budget (£1,000–£25,000 or whatever you choose), then buy and sell stocks from your watchlists. Prices come from the live market — but the trades are pretend.

To make it realistic, a small spread and a flat fee per trade are deducted, just like a real broker. The dashboard tracks your total value, cash left, unrealised profit / loss, and history.

What it's good for

Testing a strategy before real money — "what if I bought every stock I rated above +30?". Learning how P&L moves day-to-day. Seeing how the ratings change after you buy. None of it costs anything, none of it counts.

Searching for stocks

The search page lets you find any U.S. public company — over 10,000 tickers including big names (Apple, NVIDIA), well-known but niche names (Airbnb, Roblox, Palantir), and the long tail.

How search works

Start typing a ticker or company name in the search box at the top. Matches appear instantly. Tap any result to open the card — the live data fills in within a second.

Use the Filter chips to narrow by sector, market size, or score range, and the Sort menu to rank by Fundamental Score, price, or other ratings.

Discover

Tap the Discover chip for a curated set of stock collections: by sector, by ETF type, "best fundamentals this week", and similar. Quicker than scrolling the full list when you're not looking for anything specific.

Sharing

Every card has a small button at the top-right. Tap it to share that card as an image — the share menu offers your phone's native share sheet (Messages, WhatsApp, etc.) or a Copy-image button.

What gets shared

A 1080×1080 image that looks like the card itself — branded with the StockDecks logo and a link, so anyone you send it to can tap through to see the live version. Front of card, back of card, comparison and sector pages all have their own share styles.

Important — please read

This is not financial advice.

Ratings are generated automatically from rules-based signals applied to publicly available data (price history, financial filings, analyst targets, sector data). They do not account for your personal financial circumstances, risk tolerance, time horizon or goals.

Past performance does not indicate future results.

Use these ratings as a starting point for your own research, never as a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do your own due diligence and consider speaking with a qualified financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Read the full disclaimer →

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