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Piotroski F-Score Screener — Find Quality Stocks (Score 7-9)
Mid-cap stocks ranked by the nine-point Piotroski F-Score, with a plain-English Strong Buy / Buy / Neutral / Avoid signal on every row. Filter by sector or jump straight to the 7-9 names with the healthiest, improving fundamentals.
How to Read the Piotroski F-Score
The Piotroski F-Score answers a single, disciplined question with nine yes-or-no tests: are this company's fundamentals strong and getting stronger? Accounting professor Joseph Piotroski built it in 2000 to separate genuinely improving businesses from value traps. Each test earns one point, so the score runs from 0 (everything deteriorating) to 9 (everything improving). It is deliberately simple — no weighting, no judgment calls, just nine objective checks on the last two years of financial statements.
The nine points fall into three buckets. Profitability (4 points): is return on assets positive, is operating cash flow positive, is ROA rising, and is cash flow bigger than reported profit? Leverage and liquidity (3 points): is long-term debt shrinking relative to assets, is the current ratio improving, and has the company avoided issuing new shares? Operating efficiency (2 points): is gross margin expanding and is asset turnover improving? Add them up and you have the F-Score.
The Signal column translates the score into an action band: Strong Buy (7-9) for the healthiest profiles, Buy (5-6) for solid, improving businesses, Neutral (3-4) for mixed pictures, and Avoid (0-2) for weak, worsening fundamentals. Use the sector and signal filters to narrow the table — for example, show only Strong Buy names inside Healthcare — then click any ticker to open the full Basis Report stock page.
For a deeper walkthrough of each of the nine tests and how to apply the score, try our Piotroski F-Score calculator, which shows the pass/fail result for a single company.
F-Score as a Quality Filter for Value Stocks
The F-Score is a quality measure, not a valuation measure — it tells you whether a business is fundamentally healthy, not whether the stock is cheap. That is exactly how Piotroski intended it to be used. His original 2000 study applied the score to the cheapest quintile of stocks by book-to-market and found that buying the high-score value names and shorting the low-score ones would have produced roughly 23 percentage points of annual outperformance. The lesson: the F-Score is most powerful as a second filter, applied after you have already found stocks that are inexpensive.
The practical workflow is to screen for cheapness first — using a low P/E, a high FCF yield, or a discount to intrinsic value — and then run the survivors through the F-Score to weed out the ones whose fundamentals are quietly deteriorating. A cheap stock with a rising F-Score is an improving business the market has not yet re-rated. A cheap stock with a falling F-Score is often cheap for a reason.
Where the F-Score Falls Short
No single number is a complete thesis. The F-Score looks backward at two fiscal years, so it reacts slowly and can miss a sudden change in the current quarter. It says nothing about valuation, competitive position, or management quality. It can also be noisy for financial companies and asset-light businesses, where balance-sheet ratios behave differently than the industrials Piotroski originally studied. Treat a high score as a green light to dig deeper, not as a buy order — pair it with a valuation check and a look at the business itself before acting.
Frequently asked questions
What does a Piotroski F-Score of 9 mean?
A 9 is a perfect score: the company passed all nine tests. It is profitable and cash-generative, its return on assets is rising, its earnings are backed by cash rather than accruals, it is reducing leverage and improving liquidity, it has not diluted shareholders, and both its gross margin and asset turnover are expanding. It is the strongest fundamental profile the score can identify, though it still tells you nothing about whether the stock is cheap.
What F-Score is considered a buy signal?
Most practitioners treat 7-9 as the strong band and 5-6 as solid. This screener labels 7-9 'Strong Buy' and 5-6 'Buy' for that reason. Scores of 3-4 are neutral and 0-2 are avoid. Remember the score measures quality, not price — the highest-conviction ideas are typically high-F-Score stocks that are also inexpensive on a valuation metric.
How does this screener get its data?
It pulls each company's two most recent fiscal years of income statement, balance sheet, and cash flow data from Yahoo Finance, computes all nine Piotroski tests, and sums them into the F-Score. It also fetches sector and market cap for filtering and context. A company only appears if it has enough historical data to compute the full score. Data refreshes hourly.
Why do some well-known companies have a low score?
The F-Score rewards year-over-year improvement, so a great company that is already at peak margins and has stable, low debt may score low simply because its metrics did not improve further — there was no room to. A mature, high-quality business can post a 4 or 5 in a steady year. That is why the score works best on out-of-favor value names, where improvement is more likely to be both real and unnoticed by the market.
Should I short stocks with a low F-Score?
Piotroski's research showed that low-score value stocks underperformed, and a long-high / short-low strategy improved returns in backtests. But shorting carries unlimited downside, borrow costs, and squeeze risk that a backtest does not capture. For most investors the safer use of a low score is simply as a red flag to avoid, or to exit an existing position, rather than as a short signal.
How do I find the full analysis for a stock in the screener?
Click the ticker symbol in the first column to open the Basis Report stock intelligence page for that company. From there you can run a full DCF valuation, review earnings quality, check analyst ratings, and generate a complete research report. The F-Score screener is the starting filter; the full report gives you the depth to make a decision.