How it Works

What

Nexticker is a fundamentals-first stock screener designed for value investors.

Traditional screeners often display dozens of fast-moving metrics—EPS shifts, quarterly spikes, or dense ratio grids. Nexticker takes a different approach: it focuses on a small set of structural indicators that reveal how a business compounds over time.

We track five key financial variables (Net Income, Revenue, Free Cash Flow (FCF), Cash Flow from Operations (CFO), and EBITDA) and their evolution over the past five years. This combination highlights operating performance, cash conversion, and their underlying strength.

Based on these signals, companies are grouped into three developmental categories: Terraforming, Steady, and Expanding. Each category corresponds to a characteristic pattern of long-term fundamentals. In the current release, the “Steady” category is fully available.

How it Works

Nexticker is designed as a slow, fundamentals-only screener. It avoids real-time noise and offers no adjustable parameters. Every category (for example, Steady) is generated by applying a fixed, transparent formula to the full universe of US-listed companies.

Each category represents a developmental stage in a company’s long-term trajectory. Because fundamentals evolve, companies can enter or exit a stage over time; we track these transitions historically.

The category view can be explored further by slicing companies by sector or SIC description and then comparing their performance through sortable metrics such as revenue, net income, free cash flow, and others.

The Floor Clearance

At the far right of each category table is the “floor clearance” indicator. This metric captures the direction of price movement by measuring the distance from the current price to the 52-week minimum—today and one month ago. Sorting by “floor clearance today,” for example, immediately highlights companies whose price is directed down to their 52-week low.

Financial indicators

We evaluate companies using five structural indicators: Net Income, Revenue, Free Cash Flow (FCF), Cash Flow from Operations (CFO), and EBITDA. Their joint behaviour over time reveals the company’s fundamental trajectory. To measure this evolution, we compute the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR), typically over a five-year window.

Standard CAGR formulas fail whenever a series contains negative values or transitions from negative to positive. In these cases, the usual geometric formulation is undefined. To maintain comparability across the entire universe, we implement appropriately modified CAGR formulations that handle negative baselines, sign reversals, and zero-value years without distortion.

Data source

Nexticker scans the financials of all U.S. companies listed on the NYSE, NYSE American (formerly AMEX), and Nasdaq that are registered with the SEC, approximately 5,000 in total.

It selects (rather than sorts) companies based on predefined financial indicators, drawing all data from reconciled annual SEC filings (e.g., 10-K or 40-F) to ensure consistency, reliability, and accurate cross-company comparisons.

Steady Companies

The Steady category represents the phase in which a business compounds efficiently and consistently. Companies in this stage manage working capital well and maintain a stable balance between operating leverage and cash conversion.

Operating leverage captures how profits respond to changes in revenue, while cash conversion measures the proportion of accounting profit that becomes cash flow. We identify this stage through a characteristic five-year growth pattern:

This ordering signals a stable compounding profile: net income growing faster than revenue, and free cash flow outpacing net income. Together, these trends indicate a mature, efficient phase of profitability and cash generation.

To avoid misclassifying companies as Steady when they are not, we apply two exclusion constraints:

1. EBITDA must have a positive CAGR and remain below the CAGR of Net Income. This checks that earnings quality is improving in line with operating performance.
2. FCF must grow faster than CFO (with CFO positive). This ensures that free cash flow growth is grounded in operating cash flow, avoiding artefacts due to one-off shifts.

We also remove statistical noise by excluding companies that report zero revenue in any year or that show revenue CAGR below –10%.

Funds, Trusts, and Depositary Receipts are excluded, leaving only true operating businesses eligible for this developmental stage.