Reading the Card

Stocks compete for capital. So we use percentile scores to rank their performance. The universe of players comprises about 700 symbols from the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ 100, plus a curated set of about 200 ETFs. Together, they represent 95% of the investable equities and provide a playing field with the safety of high liquidity. The 700 names represent ~$73 trillion in capital exposure — roughly the entire US public-equity market, plus a curated ETF pointer for every other asset class a US investor can wrap a dollar in.

Expanding further would add noise to the percentile scores without any gain. The long tail for microcaps is not included in the cohort used for scoring. However, the 500 additional equities in the Russell 1000 can be scored against the cohort. Future additions will also be scored against this fixed cohort of 700 symbols.

The ETF tier carries asset classes underrepresented in the S&P 500 — overseas equity, metals, long-duration Treasuries, and thematic baskets. Capital rotates across those classes when regimes shift, and the cohort needs to register that rotation. The ETF set includes 30 broad-market wrappers, 50 sector ETFs, 36 international funds, 25 income vehicles, 20 bond funds, 10 commodity funds, 3 crypto funds, and a few thematic funds. A separate post (ETFs) walks through how they were chosen from ~4,600 listed ETFs and what each category is a bet on.

In addition to observing an equity’s performance against its own history, we rank it against the cohort and report excess performance relative to SPY. This gives us a more meaningful basis for comparison and selection. Percentile scores normalize the scale for each metric, so they range from 0 to 100. Overlaying a color scale gives the eye a quick read of the stock's overall character before deeper analysis. There is a cognitive payoff from making the obvious plainly visible.

However, percentile is silent about magnitude. When the magnitude matters, the pages show the underlying raw number — but the first snapshot is always the percentile. Given that equities compete for capital, it is important to first know where an equity ranks within the cohort before assessing the magnitude of performance.

Each symbol gets four panels of percentile scores representing the metrics that matter. The benchmark for scoring isn't the market in the abstract, but the specific cohort the stock is pitted against for market dollars. The scoring is not against itself but against the competition. A 95th-percentile market-beat on a stock isn't "best of the large caps" — it's beat 95% of the places that dollar could have gone, including the index funds, the sector ETFs, the long-duration Treasuries, and the gold trust.

The dashboard's value lies in combining the four reads. Reading the card means reading the four answers and the gaps between them.

When the SYMBOL card says AAPL is at the 87th percentile for Market Beat 1Y, the implicit comparison is:

Over the past year, AAPL's excess return vs SPY beat 87% of the 703-name cohort — the 500 large caps, the 10 foreign large-caps, and about 200 ETFs spanning every major asset class a US investor can wrap a dollar in. Everything else on the site follows from the percentile scores.