Perform
Is it beating the market right now?
Updated June 3, 2026
What it actually measures. Take the stock's total return over the last year. Subtract what the S&P 500 (SPY) did over the same year. What's left is the part of the return that belongs to this stock specifically rather than to a rising tide. The tile shows where that figure ranks against the field.
How to read it
| If you see… | It means… |
|---|---|
| High (80–100) | A recent leader. Leaders tend to keep leading — modestly — until market leadership rotates, at which point they fall first. |
| Low (0–20) | A recent laggard. Deep laggards tend to bounce a little. "Cheap" can also stay cheap if the business is genuinely broken. |
| Middle (40–60) | Drifted with the market. This metric is silent here. Don't read direction into a middle score. |
Using it in an IRA
- Inside an IRA there's no capital-gains tax when you sell, so acting on a momentum read (trimming a fader, rotating into a leader) carries none of the tax drag it would in a taxable brokerage. Momentum-flavored strategies are simply more viable in this account.
- One tax trap that still applies: if you sell a stock at a loss in a taxable account and rebuy it in your IRA within 30 days, the IRS wash-sale rule wipes the loss out permanently — it isn't even added to your IRA basis. Keep loss-harvesting and IRA rebuying at least 31 days apart, on different names.
- Treat a low Perform score as a prompt to investigate, not a verdict. A laggard worth bouncing and a laggard that's quietly dying look identical here — Profit and Peril tell them apart.
- The headline tile is the 1-year read. The 1-month tile sometimes carries a real short-term signal; the 1-week and 1-day tiles are mostly the color of the day. Read them in that order of seriousness.
The card tells you about the stock. Your account tells you how much to own.
The fine print — formula, evidence, and where it fails
marketBeat1Y is the stock's 252-trading-day total return minus SPY's, evaluated point-in-time, then percentile-ranked across the universe.
Stability. A name in the top decile this month has a 42% chance of being there next month, 80% within ±1 decile. A moderately stable descriptor of recent leadership.
Independence. Average absolute correlation with the other three tiles is +0.18; strongest overlap is +0.31 with Money Flow (recent leaders are mechanically names where up-day volume has piled in) and +0.22 with Overall Growth. Marginal information contribution to a composite is ≈0 — it largely re-states what flow and growth already say.
Tier-1 evidence
A single tile's job is to describe a stable, distinct dimension of stock character — not to produce alpha on its own. We test that with three questions: does the metric stay where it puts a stock month-over-month (stability), is it independent of the other tiles on the card (orthogonality), and does it carry information the others don't (marginal contribution).
Correlation with the other panel headlines
Diagnostics regenerated 2026-06-01
The decile evidence (the U). Across 396 monthly anchors, 1996–2026, sorting the S&P 500 into deciles of this metric and reading the next 4-week excess return vs SPY: D10 ≈ +0.46pp/month and D1 ≈ +0.47pp/month, while deciles 3–9 cluster between 0 and +0.2pp. The two ends outperform by similar amounts for opposite reasons — continuation at the top, mean reversion at the bottom.
Evidence — decile screening
Mean forward excess return vs SPY for each decile of the metric, averaged across 396 monthly anchors from 1996-01-05 to 2026-04-17. Cohort: S&P 500 (point-in-time membership via fmp PIT view).
Failure modes
- Tail descriptor, not a monotonic gradient — both the top decile (recent leaders) and the bottom decile (recent laggards) post small positive forward excess returns vs SPY (the U-shape visible above). Deciles 4-7 cluster near zero. The metric sorts the cross-section into 'recent leader' and 'recent laggard' tails — both of which have edge for opposite reasons (continuation at the top, mean reversion at the bottom) — but doesn't rank the middle of the distribution in any meaningful way.
- Reversal at regime turns — the top-decile edge inverts exactly when leadership rotates. Through 2008Q4-2009Q1, 2020Q1, and 2022, momentum names that had ridden the prior bull leg collapsed first; the decile ladder visibly flips in these windows. The metric is descriptive of current leadership, not predictive across regime breaks.
- PIT-correct but not fully survivorship-free — the input excess-return panel doesn't carry names that left the S&P 500 before the panel was built. The PIT filter removes the late-additions lift (NVDA pre-2001, META pre-2013, TSLA pre-2020); it doesn't add back the dropped losers. True ex-ante decile means would be marginally lower than what shows above.
Signal = 52-week cumulative excess return vs SPY at month-end Fridays. Forward = next 4-week cumulative excess return vs SPY. Top-decile basket = top 20 by signal, equal-weighted; stats are computed on the resulting per-anchor excess-return series (so Sharpe is interpretable as Information Ratio and CAGR is annualized excess return).
Evidence regenerated 2026-06-01