You now carry three tools in your head: valuation (Lesson 1), trap detection (Lesson 2), and cycle awareness (Lessons 3–4). The problem is scale. Even a modest universe of 155 US companies is far more businesses than any individual can research properly — a real research pass on one company takes hours. Professionals solve this with a screen: a mechanical first filter that shrinks the haystack before human judgment gets involved. This lesson teaches you to use ours — Quorum — and, more importantly, to use any screen the right way.
What a screen is, and is not
A screen applies your rules to every stock at once, without mood, fatigue or a favourite story. That is its entire magic: consistency at scale. It will never fall in love with a ticker, never get bored on company #83, never stretch a rule because the CEO gave a good interview.
What a screen cannot do is read a footnote, judge a management team, or know that a competitor launched something devastating last month. It sees numbers. So hold this frame from the start: a screen’s output is a research list, not a buy list. The screen’s job is to make sure the hours you spend researching are spent on candidates that at least clear the numeric bar.
How Quorum builds its score
Quorum watches 155 US names and scores each 0–100 on how undervalued it looks. The score has four parts, and the weights tell you its philosophy:
- Valuation — 40 points. P/E against sensible bounds, dividend yield, drawdown from the 52-week high, and PEG (price against growth). The biggest slice, because the course of this course is: the price you pay decides your return.
- Quality — 30 points. Return on equity, margins, debt load, liquidity. This is the Lesson 2 lesson wearing a number: cheapness only counts on a business that can survive.
- Growth — 15 points. Revenue and earnings direction. Not the star of a value screen, but decay is disqualifying.
- News flow — 15 points. Recency-weighted headline sentiment. Value traps usually announce themselves in the news before the financials catch up.
Two gates then discipline the score. First, the “actually cheap” gate: a company must earn a minimum of the valuation points specifically — a wonderful-but-fully-priced business can score high on quality and still not be undervalued, and Quorum refuses to call it that. Second, the trap gates from Lesson 2 run on every cheap-looking name — falling knife, debt-heavy and unprofitable, deteriorating fundamentals, heavy negative news — and a tripped gate sends the stock to the Value Traps tab regardless of its score.
By default a name needs a score of 60 to list as undervalued, and 75+ earns the DEEP VALUE badge. There is also a sector cap, so a beaten-down industry cannot flood your whole shortlist — Lesson 4’s diversification instinct, enforced mechanically.
The analyst on top
Every so often, an AI analyst reviews the picks list against the news and the market regime, and issues one of three verdicts per pick: CONFIRM, WAIT, or AVOID, each with a short thesis. Remember its constitutional limit from Lesson 2: it can downgrade a pick, but it can never resurrect a name the safety gates rejected. The layering is deliberate and worth copying in any process you build: mechanical rules first, judgment second, and judgment only gets a veto — never a override of safety.
Reading the output like a professional
- A zero-pick day is information, not failure. In an expensive market, nothing clearing a value bar is the screen working correctly. It is telling you the shelf is overpriced — patience is a position.
- Read the sub-scores, not just the total. Two stocks at 68 can be opposite animals: one all valuation points (very cheap, mediocre business), one all quality points (fine business, barely cheap). Which you prefer is a philosophy decision the screen leaves to you.
- Read the traps tab too. Knowing why names got rejected sharpens your own trap instincts — it is Lesson 2 with live ammunition.
- Use the watchlist for names you care about. Add any ticker and Quorum gives its value read — score, cheapness, trap flags — even for names that did not make the list. Your holdings belong there.
From shortlist to decision
So the screen hands you three or four names. Now the human work starts, and it is the rest of this course: pull each name up in Stock ResearchMy WatchlistPortfolio Tracker and read its numbers and news yourself; ask the Lesson 2 question — temporary problem or terminal?; ask the Lesson 4 question — is this cheapness just peak-cycle earnings?; and then, before a single dollar moves, write down why — which is Lesson 8, and the Notebook. The screen starts the process. It never finishes it.