What separates a low valuation from financial distress?
A value stock screen identifies companies that meet your assumptions. It does not calculate intrinsic value. A low price can reflect temporary pessimism, falling earnings, expensive refinancing or a business that is losing customers. The next task is to explain the discount using filings, cash generation and comparable companies.
This page first requests a limited pool by country, sector and market cap. It then retrieves each company's TTM ratios and checks every selected condition locally. The result is a sample in the provider's order, not a complete ranking of the cheapest stocks. Expand the pool or narrow the sector before interpreting an empty list.
A reproducible value screen
Consider two fictional manufacturers with all figures in USD. These examples use the default limits: P/E at most 15, P/B at most 2, debt/equity at most 1, current ratio at least 1 and net margin at least 5%. Equality passes. Positive earnings and equity are required.
| Measure | Company A | Company B | Default test |
|---|---|---|---|
| P/E: price / TTM EPS | $30 / $2.50 = 12 | $12 / $2 = 6 | Both pass |
| P/B: price / book value per share | $30 / $20 = 1.5 | $12 / $10 = 1.2 | Both pass |
| Debt / shareholders' equity | $40m / $100m = 0.4 | $180m / $60m = 3 | B fails |
| Current assets / current liabilities | $80m / $40m = 2 | $30m / $50m = 0.6 | B fails |
| Net income / revenue × 100 | $12.5m / $156.25m × 100 = 8% | $12m / $600m × 100 = 2% | B fails |
A becomes a research candidate; B fails despite its lower P/E. Neither outcome proves fair value or predicts a return. If A's sustainable EPS were only $1, the same $30 price would imply a normalized P/E of 30. Investigate one-time gains and the earnings cycle before treating the reported 12 as cheap.
Negative earnings, missing values and sector differences
A loss-making company with a $10 share price and EPS of −$1 has a mathematical P/E of −10. It must not pass a "P/E below 15" value rule. This tool excludes non-positive P/E or TTM earnings. Non-positive book equity also fails: it makes debt/equity and book-based valuation unsuitable for this screen. Missing, nonnumeric or failed financial data is excluded with a reason, never replaced with zero.
Compare businesses with similar economics. Banks fund their operations differently from manufacturers, so this current-ratio and debt/equity template is not a bank solvency test. For REITs, examine funds from operations and property debt instead of relying on this P/E template. Asset-light firms can have small book equity; a strict P/B ceiling may remove profitable businesses. Commodity producers can look cheapest near peak profits. Those exclusions are trade-offs of these rules, not evidence that the excluded companies are poor investments.
P/S is optional and cannot establish profitability. The net-margin requirement stays active even when you add a P/S range. Setting the margin floor to zero still requires a strictly positive margin; setting debt/equity to zero permits only a reported zero debt/equity value with positive book equity.
Keep the data dates with the candidate list
TTM means trailing twelve months, not an earnings forecast. Quotes, reported accounts and valuation ratios may reflect different update times. This page shows the quote timestamp when supplied and the time the screen finished. The ratio response does not provide a reliable filing date here; the fetched time is not that date. The API also caches these ratios for up to one hour. Confirm the fiscal period, filing date, currency and restatements in the latest company filing.
Use Apply filters to create a new snapshot. Draft changes do not alter the displayed snapshot until the request completes. Save candidates as CSV to retain the applied thresholds and retrieval time. It is a research record, not historical point-in-time data for a backtest.
From the screen to TradingView confirmation
- Inspect excluded rows first. A missing ratio is a data gap; a debt ratio above your ceiling is a rule failure. Do not quietly treat them as the same financial conclusion.
- For each passing candidate, read the cash-flow statement, debt maturities and management's explanation of earnings. Ask AI Finance Agent to help locate and compare the public information, then check its cited source and reporting period. Covenants, normalized earnings and asset quality require this separate research.
- Save the CSV and resolve the correct exchange and share class in TradingView. Add the reviewed symbols to a watchlist. TradingView supports screening a watchlist; assets must match the selected screener type.
- Use Pineify Market Screener for supported technical fields such as Close / EMA 200, RSI 14 and Relative Volume. This page's P/E, debt and margin checks are separate from those technical fields. On TradingView, inspect the same timeframe, recent price gaps and trading activity. A stronger chart does not validate an intrinsic-value estimate.
Write down what would invalidate the thesis before adding a candidate to an investment plan. This tool does not calculate a margin of safety, guarantee recovery, place trades or sync a watchlist automatically.
Sources and definitions
Definitions and workflow references: SEC guide to financial statements for reading statements and comparing financial ratios; FMP TTM ratios documentation for the provider fields; TradingView watchlist screening documentation for the watchlist workflow. The example thresholds are illustrative choices, not recommendations from these sources.