Methodology
Where our numbers come from, and how they are worked out
Every figure on Fin Cascade shows the period it covers. This page lists the sources, when each one updates, and the exact rules behind the scores, so you can check any number yourself.
Prices
End-of-day, labelled with the day they closed.
Share prices come from NSE’s end-of-day file, which NSE publishes after the market closes. We check for it every 30 minutes from 4:40 pm IST and load it as soon as it appears. Index closes follow the same way, and commodity prices are taken from futures markets at about 5 pm IST.
Prices are not live. Every price on the site is marked with the day it closed, and the website picks up new data within about 10 minutes.
Financial statements
Results, balance sheet, cash flow, ratios and shareholding.
Statements are compiled from public financial data sources and refreshed at least once a week for every company. On results day the key quarterly figures are also read from the company’s own XBRL filing with NSE. Each table shows the quarter or year it covers. Ratios are worked out from these statements; a ratio that cannot be worked out is left blank, never guessed.
Business score
How strong a business is, from 0 to 100, in five parts.
| Part | Weight | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Growth | 35 | How fast the business is growing: the 7-year trend, each quarter against the same quarter a year ago, and each quarter against the one before. |
| Profitability | 20 | How much it earns on the capital it uses, compared with its sector, the whole market and its own history. |
| Safety | 15 | How likely it is to keep standing: solvency, borrowing and the quality of its earnings. The weakest of the three decides. |
| Governance | 15 | How clean the reporting and ownership look. Starts at 100 and loses points for each red flag: exchange surveillance, audit concerns, pledged promoter shares, money lent to the promoters' side, promoters leaving, and promises not kept. |
| Valuation | 15 | How cheap or expensive the stock is (100 is cheapest), against its sector, the whole market and its own P/E history. |
The score is the weighted sum of the five parts. If a part cannot be worked out for a company, its weight is left out rather than shared among the others, so the highest possible score drops; with no part at all there is no score. Scores are recomputed every weekday night. The score describes the business. It is not a rating of the stock and not a reason to buy or sell it.
Profit check
Accounting checks on the reported numbers.
- Profit is backed by cash: free cash flow is at least half of profit (or not negative in a loss year), and the cash cycle, debtor days and inventory days are not stretched
- Capital work in progress is no more than 30% of sales
- The tax rate is at least 60% of India's normal rate
- Other income is no more than 30% of pre-tax profit
- Interest is comfortably covered by operating profit
- Less than 10% of promoter shares are pledged
- Return on capital is not falling behind sales growth
- Money lent to, or guaranteed for, the promoters' side is no more than 1% of net worth
- No loan is in default
A check that cannot run because data is missing is left out; it is never counted as a pass. If fewer than 60% of the checks can run, there is no result. Otherwise the page shows how many of the checks that ran the company clears, as “X of Y checks clear”. Banks, NBFCs and insurers are not checked, because their accounts work differently.
Plain-word answers
Questions answered from the company's own numbers.
- How fast has it been growing?
- Did it grow faster than its sector?
- Is there room for the valuation to rise, or a risk it falls?
- Does its growth justify its valuation?
- How does it compare with its peers?
- What makes it hard to beat?
- Does its growth pay for itself?
Each answer is plain arithmetic on the stored financials and the company’s peers. The longer written explanations in Pro are drafted by AI models from those computed numbers: the AI writes the words, it never calculates the figures.
Supply chain and industry numbers
Who supplies whom, and each sector's own figures.
Links between companies come from the companies’ own documents: annual reports (named customers above 10% of revenue), earnings-call transcripts (the commodities a business depends on, and plant capacity), investor presentations, and the related-party disclosures in half-yearly XBRL filings. AI models read the reports, transcripts and presentations; the XBRL disclosures are read without AI. Competitors come from peer lists, and an AI model’s reading of public information fills gaps. When two sources disagree, the annual report wins, then the investor presentation, then the call transcript, then the model.
Sector-specific numbers, such as a bank’s NPAs or a cement maker’s EBITDA per tonne, come from the same documents plus our own calculations, and from AMFI for mutual-fund companies. Sector medians are worked out every hour, only for sectors with at least five companies.
Market and company events
How news is read and linked.
Market news comes from 13 Indian business and market news sources, and AI models sort each story into an event. Company events come from announcements on NSE, read from 9 am to 11 pm IST and sorted by NSE’s own categories, without AI. The companies an event reaches are found on the supply-chain map (the companies in the sector, or the suppliers, customers and competitors linked to the company) and ranked by a fixed formula.
Market mood
One reading of the whole market, after each trading day.
Worked out once a day, after about 8:35 pm IST. The put-call ratio is shown next to it but not counted.
Screener
47 filters on the same numbers.
The screener filters every listed company on 47 measures drawn from the same stored numbers as the company pages, so a filter and a company page never disagree.
Limits
What to keep in mind.
Numbers can be late, incomplete or wrong, and prices are a day old. Always check a company’s own filings with the exchange before you act. Nothing on Fin Cascade is investment advice, and Fin Cascade is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst.
Report a wrong number
We check every report against the filing.
Email [email protected] with the company, the figure and where you saw it. We check it against the company’s own filing and correct the page.