Path 01 · 6 min read
How to read a stock profile
A stock profile is a lot of information on one page. This walk-through follows the same top-to-bottom path your eye takes the first time you land on a ticker, and names each piece as it comes.
By the end, the page should stop being a wall of numbers and start being a story you can read.
Start at the very top — the short code that names the company on the exchange.
01Ticker
A stock's short trading code on an exchange — NVDA for NVIDIA, AAPL for Apple. Unique per exchange.
A ticker symbol is the short identifier a stock trades under on a given exchange — typically one to five letters.
We use the U.S. exchange ticker throughout. The same company can have different tickers on different exchanges; if a company is dual-listed, the U.S. listing is the one we cover.
Sitting next to the ticker, the industry bucket.
02Sector
The broad industry bucket a company belongs to — Semiconductors, Banks, Energy, etc. Useful for comparing peers.
The big number — what one share last traded for.
03Price
The last traded price per share. Updates intraday; ours is the most recent print at the time the page loaded.
- 04
Today's change
How much the share price has moved since yesterday's close, in percent. Green = up, red = down.
Live example
NVDA$125.30+2.41%META$612.04−0.18% Right alongside the price, a tiny line shows the recent shape.
05Sparkline
The tiny line chart next to a price. It shows the recent price path — shape over precision.
Live example
$125.30+2.4%$97.10−3.1%Drop down to the metric strip — the first thing on it is the company's size.
06Market cap
Share price × shares outstanding. The market's tag for the whole company's equity. Big = mega-cap; small = small-cap.
Market capitalisation is the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It is the market's current price tag for the company's entire equity stake.
Rough buckets: mega-cap ($200B+), large-cap ($10B–$200B), mid-cap ($2B–$10B), small-cap ($300M–$2B), micro-cap (below $300M). The bigger the cap, the more liquid the stock and the more analyst coverage it tends to have.
Live example
- Mega-cap$200B+e.g. NVDA, AAPL
- Large-cap$10B–$200Be.g. UBER, SHOP
- Mid-cap$2B–$10Be.g. DBX, SOFI
- Small-cap$300M–$2Be.g. BIRD, SMR
- 07
P/E ratio
Price ÷ earnings per share. How many dollars investors pay today for each dollar of yearly profit.
The price-to-earnings ratio divides the current share price by the company's earnings per share over the last year. A P/E of 20 means investors are paying $20 for every $1 of annual profit.
High P/Es typically signal that the market expects strong growth; low P/Es can signal a value play or a business in trouble. Always compare a P/E against peers in the same sector, not across sectors. P/E breaks entirely when EPS is negative — for unprofitable growth companies, reach for price-to-sales or EV/EBITDA instead.
Live example
- NVDA49.2Growth premium — earnings expected to keep climbing.
- AAPL32.8Premium mega-cap — high quality, modest growth.
- GM6.4Cyclical, capital-intensive — market discounts the earnings.
Three different P/Es, three different stories. The number alone isn't the verdict — context is.
Now the editorial layer — the single label every covered stock carries.
08Verdict
The publisher's standing call on a stock — Buy, Hold, Trim, or Avoid. It's an opinion, not advice.
Every stock we cover carries a single label — Buy, Hold, Trim, or Avoid — that summarises the editorial line on the evidence as of the last refresh.
Buy reads as materially favourable, Hold as balanced, Trim as mildly unfavourable with risks rising, and Avoid as materially unfavourable. The label is the same for everyone; it does not consider what you own or what you paid.
Tap a verdict pill anywhere in the app to jump to that ticker's full profile and read the supporting bull, base, and bear cases.
Live example
Buy84%Hold62%Trim71%Avoid89%Four labels, one per company. Tap any pill in the app to open the full profile.
- 09
Confidence
How sure the model is in the verdict, 0% to 100%. Higher means the evidence pointed cleanly in one direction.
Confidence is a number from 0% to 100% that the verdict model attaches to its own call. A 90% Buy means the signals overwhelmingly pointed one way; a 55% Hold means the evidence was genuinely mixed.
It is not a probability of being right. Treat it as a measure of how clean the evidence was, not how likely the stock is to go up.
Live example
92%Clean evidence, one direction68%Leans, but a real counter-case41%Genuinely mixed — call is fragile Underneath the verdict, the three narratives.
10Bull / Base / Bear
Three narratives on every verdict: the optimistic case (bull), the most likely (base), and what could go wrong (bear).
Every full verdict ships with three short narratives.
The bull case is what the optimist sees — the upside if things go right. The base case is the most likely path given current evidence. The bear case is what breaks the story — the risks that could make the verdict wrong.
Reading all three is the point. A high-conviction Buy with a thin bear case is a different signal from a high-conviction Buy with a serious one.
Live example
Bull
Hyperscaler capex re-accelerates; another guide-up.
Base
Growth holds near 30%; multiple slowly reverts.
Bear
Customer concentration cracks; export controls tighten.
- 11
Why-now evidence
The handful of signals that pushed the verdict in its current direction. Each chip is tappable for a deeper AI explanation.
Beneath every verdict are a few coloured chips labelled with the specific signals that moved the model — an insider buy, a transcript tone shift, an unusual options print, a filing diff.
Green chips lean bullish, red chips lean bearish, grey is neutral context. Tapping a chip pushes a focused question into the AI sheet so you can dig into that one signal without losing your place.
Live example
Insider buy · $2.1MShort interest ↑ 18%10-Q filed · 2 days agoTranscript tone ↑ And every claim must be traceable.
12Citation
A traceable claim → source mapping. Every verdict must point at the specific filings, prints, or data points behind it.
Verdicts are required to cite. Each claim the model makes is tied to a source (Edgar, FRED, OpenInsider, Quiver, transcript), a one-line claim, and the value pulled.
If a verdict can't cite, the pipeline doesn't ship it. This is what separates the verdict from a generic chatbot summary.
That's the whole page. Twelve concepts that, once named, turn a dense screen into a sequence you can read top-to-bottom.
Quick check
Did it stick?
3 questions · pass at 3/3.
1. Market cap is best described as…
2. A 90% confidence Buy means…
3. The bull, base, and bear cases together describe…