Forensic Analysis · Healthcare / Pharmaceuticals / Biotech · as of Sep 24, 2026
Guardant Health, Inc. (GH)
A forensic read on Guardant Health, Inc. built from its complete SEC filings — financial-health screens, earnings quality, red flags and a price-aware rating. Reproducible math, not opinion.
F · Poor — capital at risk
Forensic grade
Safe
Financial health
9.2
Distress distance
Clean
Earnings quality
5
Forensic signals
-51.4
P / E (ttm)
$23.7B
Market cap
0.00%
Dividend yield
32.9%
Revenue growth
This free snapshot doesn't read filing or proxy text, so the auditor-quality and governance checks that can lower a grade were not evaluated (red flags, auditor quality, say on pay, board independence, going concern, valuation). Those checks only ever lower a grade, so the full analysis can land below the grade above but never above it — treat it as the most favourable reading, not the settled one.
Guardant Health, Inc. earns an F (Poor — capital at risk) forensic quality grade, and its balance-sheet distress test reads 9.2, placing it in the Safe zone. 5 forensic signals were flagged in its latest SEC filings, led by accruals ratio (% of noa).
What the filings flag
+73.0%
FY2024→FY2025
Accruals ratio (% of NOA).Net operating assets grew +73.0% relative to their own average in FY2025 — scaled by NOA itself, not by total assets, which is what the Forensic Screens card's own accrual row divides by. Accruals are building sharply — a large slice of profit sits in operating assets, not cash. An accrual is a claim that still has to be collected or written down, so the gap resolves in a later period whichever way it goes. The build is led by receivables up +25% against revenue +33% and inventory up +21% against +20% in cost of sales. A cash-flow measure on the same base disagrees: reported earnings ran behind operating cash by 31% of net operating assets, against an accruals ratio of 73.0%. The two are computed differently: the accruals ratio is the change in net operating assets over average net operating assets, while the cash-flow figure is net income less operating cash flow over that same average. Read them as two results, not one.
-25.9%
FY2025
Return on invested capital.Return on invested capital is -25.9% in the latest fiscal year and rising across FY2023–FY2025 from -100%. The capital base behind it cannot be compared across FY2023–FY2025: long-term debt is tagged in one of those two fiscal years and not the other, and an untagged line enters this calculation as zero, so any change in the base would be a change in what the filer tagged.
+5.8%/yr
FY2023–FY2025
Share-count dilution.Diluted share count changed +12% over the last 2 years to FY2025 (+5.8%/yr). The count is growing: more stock was issued than repurchased over this window, so aggregate results grew faster than their per-share equivalents. That's ~5.8% shaved off per-share growth every year — total profit has to grow that much just to keep earnings-per-share flat, and a stake held since FY2023 has been diluted ~11%.
FCF ($233M)
Key fundamentals
Latest Revenue$982.0M
Revenue Growth YoY+32.9%
Revenue CAGR (2yr)+31.9%
Net Margin-42.4%
Free Cash Flow-$233.1M
The forensic grade and screens above are free — no account needed. Want the AI investment read on top — the 0–100 rating, thesis, bull-vs-bear, red flags and the 12-month scenario, written from Guardant Health, Inc.'s actual 10-K/10-Q/8-K filings?
Data from SEC EDGAR public filings · metrics as of Sep 24, 2026. Forensic signals flag probability, not certainty.
FY2025
Shareholder returns.Returned $45M to shareholders (buybacks + dividends) in FY2025, but free cash flow was ($233M) after capex — there was no free cash flow to fund the payout from at all, and operating cash flow itself was negative or zero that year too. The entire return is coming from debt or cash reserves, not cash the business itself generated — a harder case than returns merely running ahead of free cash flow, since here there was none to run ahead of.
17% of rev
FY2025
Stock-based comp load.Stock-based compensation ran 17% of revenue in FY2025 — about $1.33 per diluted share. No cash left the business to pay it, which is why operating cash flow adds it back. Net of repurchases the diluted count still rose about 5.9% a year, and the rate is falling. Stock compensation is one source of that issuance; acquisition consideration, equity raises, convertibles and other employee plans also net into the count, and these figures do not separate them.
Guardant Health, Inc. (GH) Stock — Forensic Analysis, Red Flags & Rating | Stockonomy · Stockonomy