At the turn of the millennium, an accountancy professor named Joseph Piotroski published a paper that outlined a method to find ‘cheap’ stocks that had a greater chance of performing well. Mr Piotroski assigned cheap stocks a point for each one of nine fundamental factors they displayed to create what he called an F-Score. A score of 8 or 9 is considered high. The components of this F-Score are listed below. They are essentially an interplay of factors that suggest a company has successfully been improving its profits and cash flows using only internally generated capital.
F-Score criteria
â– Positive profit after tax, excluding exceptional items.