How it works · why trust it

Forensic stock research, from the filings — not opinion

Stockonomy reads the warning signs out of a company's SEC filings — a quality grade, red flags, distress and earnings-quality screens — and explains them in plain English. The core is deterministic math you can reproduce, not a chatbot's guess.

The problem it solves

The honest risk picture of any stock isn't the price chart — it's in the SEC filings every public company is legally required to publish: how strong the balance sheet is, whether the reported profits turn into real cash, and whether the price already assumes perfection. But that's 200+ pages of footnotes per company, so most people just hope. The tools that promise to help are usually one of two things: someone's opinion, or an AI chatbot that will confidently invent a number.

How it works — deterministic, not a chatbot

The entire scoring path is deterministic. The grade, the Altman-Z distress score, the Beneish-M earnings-quality score, the cash-conversion and capital-allocation checks — all of it is computed straight from the company's XBRL financial data with fixed formulas. No large language model touches the numbers. That matters for two reasons: it's reproducible(the same filing always produces the same score, and you can check the math), and it can't hallucinate a figure that isn't in the filing. An LLM is used only to write the plain-English narrative on top of numbers it is not allowed to invent.

This is the core difference from every “AI stock analyzer” at this price point. They are LLM wrappers — the model decides the verdict, so it can drift, flatter, or fabricate. Here the verdict is math; the AI just explains it.

What it actually checks

Financial health (Altman Z-score): the classic distress screen — how close a balance sheet is to real strain.
Earnings quality (Beneish M-score + cash conversion): do the reported profits turn into cash, or are they accruals and aggressive recognition?
Capital allocation: ROIC, dilution, buyback timing, payout discipline — is management creating value or destroying it?
Forensic text signals: material-weakness, going-concern, restatement and auditor-change language pulled straight from the filing text.
A price-aware rating + a calibrated 12-month forecast: not a fake price target — an honest probability distribution with a fat left tail, fit on out-of-sample history.

How we keep ourselves honest

We don't ask you to take the engine on faith. To test it, we replay the exact same engine on real companies' financials truncated to before known blow-ups — Carvana, Bed Bath & Beyond, Peloton — using only data that was public at the time. It flagged them on pre-collapse data; healthy controls (Apple, Microsoft) at the same cutoff did not, so it's not just crying wolf. We also calibrate the grade across more than a thousand point-in-time cases and measure the realized forward return and wipeout rate by grade.

And we're loud about the limits: forensic signals flag probability, not certainty; most companies that show one signal never collapse; small-caps are noisier; and the forecast band runs a touch narrow in the most volatile years. The full, reproducible track record — with the limits stated plainly — is on the proof page.

Who it's for

Anyone who holds real positions and wants to know the risk they're actually taking — especially people concentrated in a single stock (an employer's RSUs, one big bet) who can't afford to be the last to know when the fundamentals quietly deteriorate.

Who's behind it

Stockonomy is built and run by an independent developer who got tired of holding a concentrated position with no fast, honest way to read the risk buried in the filings. It's built in the open — the methodology and the full track record are public on purpose, because for a money tool, transparency is the trust. (Putting a face and a name to it soon; in the meantime the math speaks for itself, and you can reproduce all of it.)

Questions, corrections, or feedback are genuinely welcome — support@stockonomy.net.

See it on a stock you own

Run any US stock through the forensic engine — grade, red flags, the distress screens behind them. Free, no card.

Analyze any stock — free →

Know the real risk in what you own

Run any US stock through the forensic engine — a quality grade, red flags and the distress screens behind them, built from the complete SEC filings. Free, no card.

Analyze any stock — free →

All guidesThe proof / track recordBrowse stock analysesHow it works

Stockonomy is an educational research tool. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a solicitation to buy or sell any security. Forensic signals flag probability, not certainty. Data is sourced from public SEC EDGAR filings.