We backtested our own scoring method. Here's what didn't work.

We ran our own scoring method through a backtest and are publishing the result, the data, and the method, including the part that found nothing.

The universe is a sample of the S&P 500: 170 current members on the survivors panel, and 188 names once a delisted supplement is added. The saved report lists two dropped tickers (IPG, HES), without recording their individual exclusion reasons. We score companies at 20 quarterly dates and measure forward excess return against SPY at six and twelve months.

The method under test is our sector composite (four axes weighted 30/30/20/20) plus 24 individual factor signals: the F-Score, ROIC, margins, leverage and liquidity, growth, momentum, earnings yield, and earnings-surprise and PEAD measures. Six insider Form-4 signals had no usable history over the window and are marked as missing. The forward outlook axis is neutralized here: it would need analyst consensus for a past quarter, which we do not store.

For each factor we rank every ticker in the cross-section and take the Spearman rank correlation with forward excess return, the rank information coefficient (IC). A positive IC means higher-ranked names did better; zero means the ranking carried no information.

Overlapping forward windows make the quarterly IC estimates autocorrelated, which can overstate a naive t-statistic. The run uses Newey–West standard errors (Bartlett kernel, lag = ceil(months / 3) − 1) to account for this dependence; the overlapping windows remain in the sample. Separately, each company is excluded from its own peer pool. The sector composite and its axes are set out on the methodology page.

The tables below give the rank IC, its Newey–West t-statistic, and the quarter count for each factor, at six and twelve months. The all-names panel comes first; the survivors-only panel is folded below it. The sector composite and F-Score rows are set apart.

A null result is easy to over-read in either direction. A few things this study does not establish.

This is why the site's verdict is written as a classification, not a forecast. The sector composite sorts a company against its sector by a fixed rule; the backtest is the reason we attach no return promise to that sort.

We will claim predictive power only once a backtest shows a durable, out-of-period edge. So far it has not.

These files contain the saved aggregate results for every factor, horizon, and panel, including the empty insider rows. The JSON has curated metadata, and the CSV is the flat factor-IC table. They do not include the original inputs or company-quarter observations needed to reproduce the calculations. The July 2026 figures have been preserved and have not been recalculated after the September audit fixes.