ALLE

Lower is generally better for shareholder cash returns — less of every dollar of revenue gets reinvested in maintaining the asset base. But very low values can flag under-investment in a capital-intensive business, which catches up later via deteriorating capacity or competitiveness. Pairs with FCF margin to separate 'thin operating margin' from 'fat operating margin offset by heavy capex'.

Sanity-check on earnings quality — a ratio of 1.0 means every dollar of GAAP earnings shows up as free cash flow. Persistently below 1.0 means working-capital build or capex is consuming earnings; persistently above 1.0 is unusual and may flag accounting conservatism (heavy non-cash charges) or a one-time release. Trend matters more than absolute level.

End-to-end conversion ratio: of every dollar of revenue, how much falls through to genuine free cash flow available to all capital providers? More honest than net margin because it accounts for the capex needed to maintain (and grow) the business. The single best indicator of whether the business is a quality compounder or a GAAP-earnings illusion.

Joel Greenblatt's reformulation of return-on-capital, designed to filter for businesses that earn high pre-tax returns on the tangible operating capital that actually generates EBIT. Excludes goodwill and acquired intangibles so that two firms with the same operating economics rank similarly regardless of acquisition history. Pairs with Greenblatt's Earnings Yield (EBIT/EV) to produce the famous 'Magic Formula' rank — quality stocks at value prices.

Operating margin minus interest, tax, and below-the-line items. Useful but noisier than operating margin: tax rate changes, debt-service shifts, and one-time items can move net margin year-over-year even when the operating business is unchanged. Always pair with operating margin and FCF margin — divergence between them is a tell about leverage, tax structure, or earnings quality.

Capital-efficiency measure that ignores how the assets are financed. Useful for comparing within a sector but heavily biased by industry — banks and utilities run low ROA by design (huge balance sheets), software and franchise businesses run high ROA (asset-light). The DuPont decomposition links it to ROE: ROE = ROA × (assets / equity), so leverage inflates the gap between ROA and ROE.

The headline profitability metric. Net income divided by average book equity tells you how productive each dollar of shareholders' capital is. High sustained ROE compounds book value when the business can reinvest at a similar return. Two warnings: ROE rises mechanically with leverage (high D/E inflates ROE without making the business better), and aggressive buybacks can shrink the equity denominator faster than they shrink earnings, artificially boosting ROE even as fundamental returns are flat.

How long the average sale sits as a receivable before becoming cash. Earnings-quality flag: receivables growing faster than revenue is one of the cleanest tells for revenue recognition stretching — Beneish flagged exactly this pattern as a primary fraud indicator. Industry context matters: B2B / project businesses run longer DSO than retail, but the trend is more important than the level.

Sustainability check on the dividend yield. Below 30% means the dividend has substantial room to grow; 30–60% is the conventional sweet spot for a mature payer; above 85% is stretched and frequently precedes a cut. REITs and utilities run higher than the broad market by design — REIT payouts above 80% are normal because the structure requires distributing most income.

CCI measures how far the current typical price ((H+L+C)/3) sits from its rolling SMA, normalized by the mean absolute deviation. Originally built for commodity cycles by Donald Lambert; widely used as a generic momentum / overbought-oversold gauge on any asset. CCI is unbounded but ±100 is the conventional 'normal range' edge — readings beyond that are interpreted as strong directional thrusts or stretched extremes depending on context.

+1 while CCI is below -100 (oversold); -1 while CCI is above +100 (overbought); 0 inside the ±100 band.

+1 = oversold (stretched below the typical-price mean, mean-reversion buy bias), -1 = overbought (stretched above), 0 = inside the ±100 band.

Designed to buy oversold pullbacks within an established uptrend (price above the regime moving average). Uses a 2-period RSI rather than the standard 14 to make it hyper-responsive to short-term swings. The default exit_method is RSI-threshold based: hold while RSI(2) is below the configured exit threshold and exit when RSI(2) crosses above exit. The book-style SMA exit is also supported by setting exit_method=sma with exit_ma.

+1 when price is above regime_ma and RSI(2) drops below oversold; held while inside the trade; back to 0 when the configured exit_method fires.

+1 = pullback-buy state active, -1 = pullback-short state active (symmetric rule in a down regime), 0 = flat.

Bullish when %K crosses above %D while both lines are below the oversold threshold (typically 20); bearish when %K crosses below %D while both are above overbought (typically 80). Filters out mid-range stochastic crosses, which whipsaw in chop. Best used at well-defined ranges and at trend extremes.

+1 on bullish cross in oversold; -1 on bearish cross in overbought; 0 otherwise.

+1 = oversold bullish cross, -1 = overbought bearish cross.

Stochastic RSI applies the stochastic oscillator formula to RSI values rather than price, producing a faster, more sensitive 0-100 momentum read. Readings below 20 are oversold and above 80 overbought. The signal latches bullish when FastK crosses above FastD while in the oversold zone and stays on until FastK drops back below FastD; the bearish mirror latches on a cross down in the overbought zone. More reactive than plain RSI, so best filtered by trend context.

+1 latches when FastK crosses above FastD while FastK is below the oversold threshold (default 20), and holds until FastK falls back below FastD; -1 latches when FastK crosses below FastD while FastK is above the overbought threshold (default 80), and holds until FastK rises back above FastD; 0 otherwise.

+1 = bullish oversold cross still latched, -1 = bearish overbought cross still latched, 0 = no latched cross.

Williams %R maps close-to-range position onto a -100 to 0 scale: -100 means the close is right at the lookback period's low (oversold), 0 means right at the period's high (overbought). The oscillator's interpretation mirrors RSI but the scale is inverted. Like other OB/OS oscillators, it works best as a tactical timing aid inside an already-established trend, not as a standalone reversal trigger in choppy markets.

+1 while %R is below -80 (oversold); -1 while %R is above -20 (overbought); 0 in between.

+1 = oversold (bullish), -1 = overbought (bearish), 0 = mid-range.