Read company results, valuation drivers and sector dynamics, with guides to interpreting earnings and business fundamentals.
32 guides. Start with the introductory topics; follow related links inside each guide.
The options market publishes a number for how far a stock moves on earnings day. Comparing it with what actually happened last time is one of the cleanest edges available for free.
A capex number buried in a slide deck now moves more market value than most earnings beats. The reason is what spending does to free cash flow.
Four times a year, every public company opens its books. What happens in the hour after those numbers land often matters more than the numbers themselves.
A "beat" sounds like unambiguous good news. In practice, the stock reaction depends on what the beat was measured against — and what it left out.
Revenue tells you how much a business sold. Earnings per share tells you how much it kept. Confusing the two is one of the most common mistakes in reading a headline.
The quarter a company just reported is already history by the time the market sees it. Guidance is management's best estimate of what comes next — and it usually moves the stock more.
Behind every "beat" or "miss" headline is a consensus number built by dozens of analysts working independently. How that number forms — and shifts — shapes how markets trade.
Wall Street has an official consensus estimate — and an unofficial one that trades right alongside it. The gap between the two can explain a reaction the headline number can't.
It's one of the most counterintuitive moves in markets: a company beats on revenue and profit, and the stock drops double digits the same day. Here's the mechanics behind it.
The most-watched valuation ratio on Wall Street isn't based on what a company already earned — it's based on what analysts think it's about to earn.
P/E, EV/EBITDA, PEG, Price-to-Sales — different multiples exist because no single ratio works for every kind of company. Knowing which one to reach for matters as much as the number itself.
The 11 SPDR sector ETFs, what each one tracks, and how sector rotation tells you where money is flowing.
Software, chips, and cloud infrastructure make up the market's biggest growth engine — and, because of how far out its cash flows sit, its most rate-sensitive one.
The financial sector runs on borrowed and lent money, and its fortunes hinge less on where interest rates sit than on the shape of the yield curve.
Healthcare is the market's classic defensive sector — but its biotech corner behaves nothing like its pharma and insurance corners, and trades more on binary trial outcomes than on the economy.
From factory equipment to freight to fighter jets, industrials are the market's capex barometer — a classic cyclical sector that rises and falls with manufacturing and trade.
Regulated, slow-growing, and reliably dividend-paying, utilities are the market's closest thing to a bond substitute — which is exactly why rate moves hit them so directly.
Energy stocks track the price of oil and gas far more closely than they track the broader economy, making OPEC+ decisions and geopolitical supply risk the sector's real drivers.
Food, household basics, and discount retail make up the sector people keep buying no matter what the economy is doing — its risk shows up in input costs, not demand.
Retail, autos, restaurants, and travel make up the sector that only thrives when households feel confident enough to spend beyond the essentials.
Chemicals, metals, and building materials sit at the base of the industrial supply chain, making this sector a direct bet on global manufacturing and construction demand.
Real estate investment trusts are structurally required to pay out most of their income as dividends, which makes them highly rate-sensitive — and their property types are currently diverging sharply from one another.
Free cash flow strips out the accounting judgment calls and shows what a business actually generates once it pays to keep the lights on.
Gross margin is the first number that shows whether a company's core product actually makes money before anything else gets paid.
Operating margin picks up where gross margin leaves off, revealing how much profit survives after running the actual business.
EBITDA strips out financing and accounting choices to approximate a company's core operating cash generation — but it has blind spots worth knowing before you lean on it.
Return on equity measures how efficiently a company turns shareholders' money into profit — but the number can be flattered by debt alone.
Return on invested capital measures profitability against the full capital a business employs, debt and equity alike, making it much harder to flatter with leverage.
Debt-to-equity measures how much of a company is financed by borrowing versus ownership capital, and what counts as safe depends entirely on the business.
Enterprise value estimates what it would actually cost to buy an entire business, debt and cash included, making it a more complete figure than market cap alone.
Two companies can report the same earnings-per-share number and mean completely different things by it — earnings quality is about which one you can trust.
When a strong quarter collides with weak guidance, or a weak quarter comes with a raised outlook, markets almost always vote with the forecast.