Most stock analysis collapses into a single number — a buy rating, a target price, a thesis. The signal disappears. A company can be cheap because it's dying. A company can grow fast and burn through cash before it ever reaches profitability. A company can have a rock-solid balance sheet with no engine pulling it forward. The same "12-month target" hides all of it.
Investa-Gate runs every stock through three independent gates instead — survival, growth, valuation. Each gate is scored on its own, 0 to 100, against benchmarks built for the company's sector. All three are shown side by side — no gate gets to hide behind another, and every part of the picture stays visible.
The scores come from fundamentals alone — filed financials and analyst consensus. No news, no sentiment, no price momentum touches the number.
A recurring-dividend payer, a fast-growing operator, and a pre-revenue moonshot aren't the same bet — and grading them the same way is how most tools go wrong. So before anything else, every stock is sorted into a league by what it actually is, and each league is judged on what matters for it:
And within every league, the benchmarks are set per sector, from the actual universe of companies in it — a 5% return on assets is healthy for a refiner and weak for a software company, and the scoring knows the difference. Same three gates for everyone; different evidence for what a good answer looks like.
Can the company stay solvent through the cycle? The gate scores financial strength against benchmarks built for the company's sector. What matters for a biotech burning cash isn't what matters for a bank — and we don't pretend it is.
When the picture is severe — distressed balance sheet, going-concern warnings — survival dominates the read regardless of how compelling the other gates look. A "great valuation" on a company about to fail isn't a bargain; it's a warning.
Is the engine still firing — and where is it headed? The growth gate is forward-looking by design: it weights where the company is going — its projected revenue growth and the direction its margins are moving — over where it's already been. A strong trailing year means little if the forward picture is rolling over. Where reported earnings are distorted by one-time items, the cleaned-up figure is shown alongside the headline — never silently swapped in.
For companies whose entire thesis is growth, a weak forward outlook is the story — no matter how cheap the price looks. And a pre-revenue venture is judged on whether its top line is actually scaling, not on earnings it doesn't have yet.
Valuation isn't a stock picker — it's a timer, there to keep you from overpaying for a good business. And "fair" isn't one number. A fast grower is judged on its price relative to its growth — a rich multiple can be cheap if the growth backs it, and a cheap one dear if it doesn't. A steady payer is judged against its own history and what its sector normally commands. Either way, the gate flags when a "cheap" price is really a business in decline. Growth tells you whether the company is worth owning; valuation tells you whether the price is.
There's no single grade that blends the three gates into one number — because a blended grade is exactly where a broken balance sheet or a collapsing growth story gets to hide. You see survival, growth, and valuation as three separate scores, and you decide what matters for the stock in front of you.
Every scoring engine is only as honest as its data — and market data feeds lie constantly. Most tools score the lies anyway. We built a layer whose whole job is to catch them first, and it works the hard way: every number has to agree with the company's own other numbers before it's allowed to move a score. Real catches, from our own audits:
Bonds dressed as stocks. We found dozens of exchange-traded bonds and preferred shares circulating in standard data feeds under their parent company's clean name — indistinguishable from equity in every field. Scoring a bond like a stock is a category error, so they were identified, verified one by one, and purged.
Fake growth. A stored "+230% earnings growth" figure that the company's own filed numbers put at +12%. Growth claims measured off one-time-crushed base years. "Explosive" forecasts with no revenue behind them. Each class gets the same treatment: re-derive from the primary figures, and if the claim still can't be explained by anything real, it's excluded — not scored.
Currency traps. Foreign companies whose earnings arrive in pesos or reais against a dollar share price, producing fantasy valuations like a 1× P/E. We don't guess a conversion — we refuse the number and score on what's clean.
Windfall earnings. When a company's bottom line is propped by a one-time gain, a mark-to-market swing, or interest income while operations lose money, its P/E is not allowed to claim "cheap." Inflated earnings looking expensive, however, still count as expensive.
All of it runs nightly, across the entire universe, automatically — and when a rule fires, the raw figure is kept and flagged, never silently rewritten.
Some stocks can't be scored honestly — coverage too thin to trust the estimates, data that contradicts itself, a score resting on a single unverifiable number. Most tools print a number anyway. We print UNRATED.
An unreliable score isn't a low score — it's no score. A stock leaves the rankings entirely until its data earns its way back in. That single rule is why the rest of the numbers can be trusted.
Every week, every score on every stock is snapshotted and measured forward against the S&P 500 — on a public track record that only moves forward. No backtests, no cherry-picking. If the framework works, you'll see it. If it doesn't, you'll see that too.
The three scores are the headline, not the whole story. Here's the honest workflow:
Start in the right league — income, growth, or venture, depending on what you're after — then read the three gates to sort it. A stock scoring high across survival, growth, and valuation earned a closer look, not a "buy this."
Read the three scores together to see why. A 90-90-40 is a very different company than an 80-80-80 — the first is a strong business at a rich price, the second is solid across the board. The gates are where the actual information lives.
Treat UNRATED as an answer, not a gap. It means the data couldn't be trusted — which is worth knowing before you put money anywhere near it.
Check the numbers behind the scores. Every score opens onto the filing it came from — revenue, earnings, margins, cash flow, valuation history — so you can see exactly why it reads the way it does.
Then do what no tool can do for you: decide whether the business fits what you're looking for.
Investa-Gate publishes analytical scoring. It does not publish buy or sell recommendations. It does not produce price targets it can defend. The framework exists to make stock evaluation legible, not to replace judgment. Verify everything independently before making investment decisions.
The homepage carries a complete sample — all three gate scores and the numbers behind them.
See a sample