Highest Piotroski F-Score — S&P 500 stocks scoring 7+

What you’re looking at

Joseph Piotroski, an accounting professor, published a study in 2000 about cheap stocks. He had noticed that the “value” stocks academics liked to cite as winners were dragged down by a long tail of companies whose low prices were a symptom of decay rather than a bargain. He wanted a way to separate the two without reading a thousand annual reports, so he wrote down nine yes/no tests covering profitability, balance-sheet strength and operating efficiency, and found that cheap stocks passing most of them did far better than cheap stocks failing most of them.

The score is simple enough to check on a single page of any annual report. This list shows up to 50 S&P 500 companies in Filing.fyi’s database whose latest score is 7 or higher, sorted from the highest down. A 9 means the company passed every test. A 7 means it missed two. Companies below 7 are not on this list; that doesn’t make them weak, it just puts them outside the cutoff this page uses.

The nine tests, in plain words

Each test scores 1 if the company passes and 0 if it doesn’t. The total is the F-Score.

Profitability (four tests)

1. Net income was positive this year.
2. Operating cash flow was positive this year.
3. Return on assets (profit divided by total assets) was higher than last year.
4. Operating cash flow was larger than net income, so the profit is backed by cash rather than by bookkeeping entries.

Balance sheet (three tests)

5. Long-term debt relative to assets fell, or there is no long-term debt.
6. The current ratio (what’s coming in soon divided by what’s due soon) improved.
7. The company did not issue new shares.

Operating efficiency (two tests)

8. Gross margin improved.
9. Asset turnover (sales divided by total assets) improved, meaning the company got more sales out of each dollar of assets.

Test 4 deserves a special mention. A company that reports profit without the cash to match is building up receivables or other accruals faster than it collects, which is the earliest ordinary warning sign of trouble ahead. Failing it isn’t proof of anything, but it’s the test worth reading the cash-flow statement over. The Piotroski F-Score lesson works through all nine with a made-up company.

How to read the score

• 9: passed everything. Rare, and usually a sign of steady, unglamorous operating discipline: no margin squeeze, no working-capital bloat, no share issuance.
• 8: the common band for well-run companies in a good year. One miss is often a deliberate choice, such as a refinancing or an acquisition that enlarged the asset base.
• 7: the bottom of this list. Two misses on a nine-point scale is normal, and Piotroski’s original study treated 7 and above as the strong group. Usually one specific drag explains it, and the 10-K says which.

The direction matters as much as the level. An 8 that was a 9 last year is a different story from an 8 that was a 6. Where Filing.fyi has the prior year’s data, the company page shows the earlier readings.

What this list can’t tell you

• Whether the stock is cheap. Piotroski’s test was designed to sort companies that were already cheap. It says nothing about price. A perfect 9 can be expensive.
• What happens next. The score grades the last fiscal year against the one before. A known patent expiry or a regulatory change can be sitting in the risk-factors section of a company that scored 9 on last year’s numbers.
• Whether the numbers themselves are sound. A high F-Score next to a Beneish M-Score above -1.78 is a reason for caution, not comfort. If a company here is also on the value-trap radar, read the full 10-K before trusting either score.
• Much about banks, insurers and REITs. The tests assume an ordinary industrial or consumer balance sheet. For financial companies the arithmetic still runs, but a “current ratio” doesn’t mean what it means for a manufacturer, and REIT accruals look different by design. Treat those scores as weaker signals.

Why this list moves slowly

The inputs are annual: fiscal-year income statement, cash-flow statement and balance sheet from the 10-K. A company’s score therefore changes about once a year. The scores are recomputed when a company’s data is refreshed, and this page updates at each site build, so the table reflects the most recent annual data processed for each name. If the same companies sit at the top for several quarters, that’s expected; companies that pass all nine tests tend to keep passing them.

How to follow up on a name

1. Open the company page. Read the AI-written summary and the other three score cards. A high F-Score with a clean Beneish M-Score and a safe-zone Altman Z″ is the strongest combination on the site; a high F-Score with a flagged M-Score is a reason to slow down.
2. Open the latest 10-K from the filing timeline. Check the cash-flow statement against the income statement (test 4), the debt note (test 5) and the share count (test 7).
3. Look at how the score has moved. The lesson explains how to compute last year’s score yourself from the prior 10-K if the site doesn’t show it.

Related lists

• Going-concern radar: companies whose Altman Z″-Score sits in the distress zone, the opposite end of the balance-sheet spectrum.
• Value-trap radar: companies whose Beneish M-Score suggests the reported numbers deserve a closer look. A company on both lists deserves a careful read.

Common questions

A company I follow is on this list. What does it mean? That its latest annual numbers passed at least seven of Piotroski’s nine tests of profitability, balance-sheet strength and efficiency. It describes the financial statements; it says nothing about the share price and is not advice to do anything. The filings tell you which tests it passed and why.

How does this differ from a “quality” fund’s screen? Quality factors usually blend return on capital, leverage and earnings stability with weights that vary by provider. Piotroski is one published, fixed scheme with no proprietary weights, and every input is in the company’s own 10-K. Filing.fyi uses it because anyone can check it, not because it beats every other framework.

Why aren’t all S&P 500 companies here? Only companies scoring 7 or higher qualify, and the table shows at most 50 of them. Every company page shows that company’s own score regardless of whether it made this list.

How fresh is this data? Each company page shows the filing date of the inputs behind its scores. If a reading here looks stale, click through to check the date.