Three scores, kept separate. They are not averaged into one “quality” number. They point in different directions (F is a 0–9 count, higher-better; Z is a distress distance, higher-safer; M is a manipulation screen, lower-cleaner) and were fitted on different samples for different questions — a blended figure would be ours, not theirs, and would hide exactly the disagreement that is worth reading.
- Piotroski F
- 0–9, higher is stronger — nine yes/no checks on profit, leverage and efficiency, latest fiscal year vs prior. A 0–9 checklist of basic financial-health signs — profitability, low debt, improving efficiency. 7+ is strong; below 3 is weak.
- Altman Z
- A distress model, higher is safer: above 2.99 = safe, below 1.81 = distress. It uses MARKET cap, and its coefficients were fitted on manufacturers — a bank or REIT reading is not comparable.
- Altman Z′
- The private-firm version: BOOK equity instead of market cap, with its own cut-offs (2.90 / 1.23). For a highly-valued company it sits below the market Z by construction — the model changed, not the company.
- Beneish M
- An earnings-manipulation SCREEN (Beneish 1999, eight variables): above −1.78 flags accounting that resembles past manipulators. LOWER is cleaner. A flag is a question, never an accusation.
Sector context. The percentile columns on the trend rows are the ones this payload serves: “vs own” ranks the latest value inside this company’s own served history, “vs sector” inside its sector pool. A blank sector cell means the pool was too thin to rank honestly (or the metric is a currency level, where a cross-currency rank would be meaningless). The three SCORES carry no sector percentile: the payload’s percentile block covers the served ratios only, so “is this Z good for Manufacturing?” is a question we cannot answer from what is served, and we don’t pretend to.
Latest vintage only. A 12-year F-Score / Z-Score strip is not drawn. The point-in-time factor store carries valuation, returns, margin, momentum and growth factors — not these composites — and recomputing them here from the annual columns would produce a series that disagrees with the headline above (different vintage of facts, different restatement handling). A score that disagrees with itself is a wrong number, so the history is omitted rather than approximated.
The nine named F-Score checks, the Merton distance-to-default / default probability, ROIIC and the growth-durability CAGRs live on FS · Financial Strength; the full ratio grid — every served ratio, with its own trend and both percentiles — is the Ratios section below.
