Before we write a single sentence about a company, it has to clear a set of quantitative and qualitative gates. Some are screens. Some are judgment calls. Here's what they are, why each one exists, and what we explicitly don't filter for.
We define our universe as U.S.-listed common equity with a market capitalization below $300 million at the time of coverage. We exclude ADRs where the primary listing is offshore, blank-check SPACs pre-merger, and business development companies (BDCs), which we treat as a fixed-income product rather than operating equity.
That leaves roughly 2,400 names at any given time. Far more than we can cover. So every Monday, the full list runs through the following filters.
There must be a filing, earnings release, or material announcement within the last 14 days. We're a news operation, not a screener. If nothing is happening at the company, there's nothing to write.
Hard ceiling. Names that run above $300M during coverage stay in the archive but are no longer eligible for new pieces unless they round-trip back into the range.
Below this threshold, even small retail position-sizing would move the stock. Not a universe anyone can meaningfully act on, and the last thing we want is for our pieces to become the catalyst.
10-K and 10-Q current. If a company has missed a filing deadline, we cover it specifically as a red-flag piece. We don't cover names with stale filings as if the numbers were current.
We flag any auditor change in the last 24 months and any auditor on the PCAOB deficient-inspections list. This is especially material at the sub-$100M level where smaller audit shops are more common.
We compute quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year diluted share count change for every name we cover. If the trajectory is material (>10% annualized), it goes in the piece.
We need enough information in the filings to compute a credible cash-burn-to-cash-on-hand ratio. If the company won't give us that, we won't cover them as operational — only as a filing-risk story.
Companies that have threatened litigation against financial journalists, companies with active fraud investigations where coverage would prejudice a proceeding, and companies whose management team includes individuals with prior regulatory bars.
Form 4 filings over the trailing 180 days. Open-market buys and sells are both signal — we simply want to know what insiders have been doing before we publish.
If the most recent 10-K or 10-Q contains going-concern language, we cover the name only as a balance-sheet-risk piece. We do not write growth-thesis coverage on names with live going-concern flags.
Final gate, fully qualitative. Our editors have to be able to articulate a thesis — bullish, bearish, or neutral — that doesn't reduce to "it's interesting." If we can't find the angle, we pass.
Our reporting points to an improving fundamental trajectory that the market does not appear to be pricing. This is not a buy rating. It's a reflection of where the evidence leads as we read it.
Our reporting points to a deteriorating fundamental or structural risk that the market has not fully absorbed. Typical triggers include dilution schedules, going-concern flags, and business-model inconsistencies.
The setup is genuinely two-sided and we'd be pretending otherwise to pick a direction. Usually applied to names with strong qualitative stories but visible offsetting risks.
We do not filter on valuation. Expensive names get covered. Cheap names get covered. Valuation enters the analysis but never the screen — there are too many situations where the interesting story is specifically that the name trades at a premium or a discount to peers.
We do not filter on sell-side coverage. A name with two sell-side analysts covering it is just as eligible as a name with zero. Our bias is toward zero, but the rule is not a cut.
We do not filter on geography, sector, or exchange. Nasdaq, NYSE American, and OTC-QX all qualify. We do not cover pink sheets or expert-market tier names.
Every correction we publish appears in a dated list on this site. We do not silently edit pieces. If a number in a published article turns out to be wrong, a correction note gets appended to the piece — at the top, with the date — and the original wrong figure stays visible with a strikethrough. Our operating principle is that a correction is more useful to the reader than a clean rewrite that erases the mistake.