Method
How Be The Puck makes its call and tests a play
The same test for all 100 plays and all 377 stocks, written down so anyone can check it.
Your signal: the one call on each stock
Every stock gets one call, Buy, Hold or Sell, and the reader sets it. Each of 18 factors turns into points from 0 to 100: the share of the plays you count that hold the stock, analysts' upside and rating, P/E and the other value measures, growth, margins, debt, trend, momentum and crash exposure. Company numbers score by rank among every covered company, so a P/E lower than 80% of them scores 80. Your score is the weighted average of the factors you weight, over the ones the stock has; with less than half your weight available (a fund has no P/E) there's no score. Buy at 60 or more, Sell at 40 or less, unless you move the lines.
The standard weights are 40% Plays in, 30% Off the high and 30% Trend, chosen in October 2026 because every factor in them has a tested record (below) and the last two are exit rules: a stock that keeps falling, or breaks below its 200-day average, loses its Buy. Before that they were half plays, half analysts' upside, and the targets behind upside can't be tested and look better the further a stock falls. Change them, or the plays you count, from any stock page, the stock list, the screener or the watchlist, and every page follows (how the score works). Until October 2026 the site also showed a Start/Stop light, which read only the plays; the same reading is your signal with every weight on the plays. This analysis does not constitute trading advice. Please meet with an advisor or independently review sources before making any decision.
How the factors are graded
Every factor gets a record, like every play. Each month since 2011, every stock got its points on each factor from numbers public at the time: prices to that close, the plays' calls to that close, and company figures from the SEC filings filed by that date (each value dated by the filing that first reported it). A factor's Buys are stocks it scored 60 or more; its Avoids, 40 or less. Each is checked against its market (the S&P 500, or the TSX) over the next three months and the next year. The edge is how much more often the Buys beat the market than the Avoids did; it's shown beside every slider and in the guide. Analysts' targets and ratings, forward P/E, PEG and crash exposure have no record of past values and aren't graded. The test uses today's list of covered stocks, which flatters every factor alike.
Data
- Daily open, high, low, close and volume, adjusted for splits and dividends, from Yahoo Finance since January 2004. Grading starts in January 2005, or once a stock has enough history for the play.
- Company numbers come from SEC filings (XBRL) for companies that file 10-Qs, dated by filing, and from Yahoo Finance for the rest; every one passes a quality check that holds back impossible values and corrects currency mix-ups (data/quality.json).
- Cash earns the 13-week U.S. Treasury bill yield (^IRX). Canadian names use the same rate, which slightly flatters or penalises them.
- Every signal uses finished bars only. Today's price is ignored until the market has closed, and weekly or monthly plays wait for the week or month to end.
Execution and costs
- A call made on a close is acted on at the next session. Plays that buy on the signal day's close, like Connors' RSI(2), are tested the same way.
- Each switch in or out costs 0.05% for stocks and ETFs, 0.10% for crypto and 0.30% for micro caps, whose buying and selling prices are far apart.
- No leverage, no shorting, no taxes. Every play is long or in T-bills, even where its author also sold short. Each play page lists where Be The Puck's version differs from the original.
Grading
- Calls right: an in call is right if the price was higher when the next call came; an out call is right if it was lower. Open calls are not graded.
- Annual return, worst drawdown, volatility: computed on the play's daily returns, including T-bill interest while out.
- Sharpe ratio: average return above T-bills divided by volatility, annualised.
- Every play is compared with buying and holding the same stock over exactly the same dates.
The next move
- Be The Puck asks each play what it would say after one more bar at a range of hypothetical closes, from about 30% below the latest close to 40% above (wider for crypto, micro caps and monthly plays), then narrows each point where the call flips to a fraction of a cent.
- For a daily play the next bar opens at today's close; its high and low are assumed to stretch only as far as the hypothetical close. Plays that use the day's high, low or volume are approximate on that point.
- Some plays can't flip on one close, for example when a crossover needs two days or an indicator is shifted forward in time. The page says so instead of showing a level. Calendar plays show the date of their next change.
- Daily plays check every close. Weekly plays check the Friday close (Sunday for crypto). Monthly plays check the last close of the month. Future dates use the U.S. market holiday calendar.
Crash exposure
- A 10-point checklist per stock: market swings (beta over three years of weekly returns and monthly downside capture against the S&P 500, or the TSX for Canadian names; up to 3 points), past crashes (its fall against its index's in the 2000–02, 2008–09, 2020 and 2022 bear markets; up to 2), debt (negative equity, debt to equity, interest cover and net debt to EBITDA; up to 3) and run-up (two-year gains of 100% or 150%; up to 2).
- 0–2 is Low, 3–4 Moderate, 5–6 High, 7 or more Very high. It describes fragility, not timing.
- Company figures come from Yahoo Finance and are refreshed nightly; banks and insurers borrow as their business, so their debt ratios read high by design.
Market gauges
- Nine monthly series: trend (S&P 500 against its 200-day average, and how many plays hold it), valuation (Shiller CAPE from multpl.com), run-up (Nasdaq-100 two-year return), concentration (equal-weight RSP against SPY over three years), volatility (VIX), the 10-year minus 3-month yield curve, the Baa corporate spread, the Sahm rule and the 10-year Treasury yield, from Yahoo Finance and FRED.
- Each gauge is calm, watch or warning on thresholds stated on the Markets page, chosen from the research cited there. The weather word adds them up: two points per warning, one per watch, and "stormy" also needs the trend gauge to have broken.
Analysts' upside
One of the factors in your signal, and half of it with the standard weights. It's the gap between the price and analysts' average 12-month target (Yahoo Finance), scored in a straight line from 20% below the price (0) to 50% above it (full marks). A stock needs at least three analysts, and a target more than double the price is ignored as stale. Targets are opinions that lean optimistic, which is why you can weight them down or out.
Reader-requested stocks
Tickers added on the watchlist that Be The Puck doesn't cover go to a queue holding only the symbol and when it was asked for. Each night, after the U.S. close, up to 25 new symbols are checked for at least 60 sessions of price history on Yahoo Finance, added to the universe, and analysed in the next build: all 100 plays, with a full page for each. Reader-requested names are kept out of the cross-stock scoreboards so those counts don't shift as names are added. Watchlists themselves stay in the reader's browser.
Sources and attribution
Every play's origin, parameters and the analyst's bio were checked against books, journal papers, the analyst's own site or reputable references such as StockCharts ChartSchool. Where a source was missing or two sources disagreed, the play or analyst page says so. Where a rule needed a choice its author never made, such as an exit for a buy-only signal, the choice is labelled as Be The Puck's.
What this is not
Be The Puck reports what a published rule says. It does not know your goals, taxes or other holdings. This analysis does not constitute trading advice. Please meet with an advisor or independently review sources before making any decision. Past results come from a backtest on stocks that are still listed today, which flatters every play and buy and hold alike. With 100 plays and 377 stocks, some pairs will look excellent by luck alone. Summaries of each analyst's views are Be The Puck's paraphrase of public material, and Be The Puck has no affiliation with them.
Rebuilt automatically after each U.S. market close. See every play or the case against timing.