Score Your Stock checks 21 individual numbers on every company, grouped into 5 pillars. Each one answers one plain-English question, backed by its formula, and a picture of where Strong, Okay, and Weak actually start.
1. Business Strength (5 ratios)
Is the business actually good at making money?
For every RM100 you'd have put in, how hard does the company actually make that money work each year?
Formula: Net profit ÷ shareholders' equity × 100
Is the shop pulling in more customers each year, or the same crowd on repeat?
Formula: 3-year annualized revenue growth rate
Sales going up is nice — but is more of it actually turning into real profit, year after year?
Formula: 3-year annualized profit growth rate
Out of every RM100 that walks in the door, how much is left after paying every single bill?
Formula: Net profit ÷ revenue × 100
A fresher check-in — is the business still growing right now, not just in last year's annual report?
Formula: Last 4 quarters' revenue vs. the 4 quarters before that
2. Financial Safety (3 ratios)
Could it survive a bad year without getting into trouble?
How much of the company is actually the owner's own money, vs. money borrowed from the bank?
Formula: Total debt ÷ shareholders' equity
If every bill due this year landed on the desk today, could the company actually pay them all?
Formula: Current assets ÷ current liabilities
How easily does profit cover just the interest on its loans — comfortably, or barely scraping by?
Formula: Operating profit (EBIT) ÷ interest expense
See all 21, with real numbers, on a real company
3. Cash & Dividends (5 ratios)
Does owning it actually pay you, reliably?
The size of your yearly "pocket money" from owning the stock — and whether it actually shows up, year after year.
Formula: No single formula — yield %, adjusted for how often dividends were cut over 4 years
Profit is what the accountant says happened. Cash is what's actually sitting in the bank. This checks the real thing.
Formula: No formula — read straight off the cash flow statement, judged on 4-year trend
Cash left over after keeping the lights on and buying new equipment — this is what actually funds your dividend.
Formula: Operating cash flow − capital spending
The company's emergency fund. Growing = breathing room. Shrinking = something to watch.
Formula: No formula — cash trend over 4 years vs. short-term debt
How much of profit gets handed back to shareholders vs. kept in the business. Shown for reference — it doesn't change the score, except for banks and REITs.
Formula: Dividends paid ÷ net profit × 100
4. Price Fairness (3 ratios)
Are you paying a fair price for all of the above?
How many years of today's profit you're paying for, upfront, just to own one share.
Formula: Share price ÷ earnings per share
Are you paying more than what the company would be worth if it sold everything and paid off every debt today?
Formula: Share price ÷ book value per share
Adjusts the price tag for how fast profit is actually growing — a fast grower can "deserve" a higher price.
Formula: P/E ÷ yearly profit growth %
5. Risk (5 ratios)
Is any of this a real pattern, or one lucky year?
4 years of profit — was it a steady climb, or a rollercoaster?
Formula: No formula — counts down-years out of the last 4
Is the company paying down its loans over time, or quietly piling on more?
Formula: 3-year annualized debt growth rate
Is your slice of the pie shrinking because the company keeps printing new shares to raise cash?
Formula: 3-year annualized growth in shares outstanding
Is unsold stock piling up in the warehouse faster than it's actually selling?
Formula: Inventory growth rate − revenue growth rate
Same question as Earnings Consistency, just zoomed into the last 8 quarters instead of 4 years.
Formula: No formula — counts down-quarters out of the last 4 (year-on-year)
The one thing worth remembering
Every single ratio above lands in Strong, Okay, or Weak — same idea, everywhere. No one ratio decides whether a stock is good; the whole reason there are 21 of them, not 1, is that a company can be genuinely strong on some and genuinely weak on others at the same time. Want the exact formula or threshold behind any of these? See How Scoring Works.
FAQ
21, spread across 5 pillars: Business Strength (5), Financial Safety (3), Cash & Dividends (5), Price Fairness (3), and Risk (5). Every one lands in Strong, Okay, or Weak — no partial credit.
None of them alone — that's the whole point of checking 21 instead of 1. A company can be Strong on growth and Weak on debt at the same time; picking one favourite number just hides whichever fact you didn't check.
Every ratio, every pillar, and the overall score use the same idea: Strong scores 2 points, Okay scores 1, Weak scores 0 — no partial credit for landing close to a cutoff.
Banks skip Financial Safety entirely — deposits count as "debt" under accounting rules, so a bank's balance sheet looks leveraged by design, not because it's unhealthy. A few individual ratios (like Inventory vs Sales) also skip companies the measure genuinely doesn't apply to, such as banks and REITs with no inventory.
This page has the formula for every ratio. For exact threshold numbers and bank/REIT exceptions, see the How Scoring Works page.
Score Your Stock runs all 21 of these on all 1,130 Bursa-listed companies, free — look up Maybank and see every ratio with its real number, or browse every company by sector.
This article is educational content, not investment advice — always do your own research, or speak to a licensed financial adviser, before investing. See About for more on how this site works.