Owner Scorecard
An independent research publication · June 14, 2026

How to read a business

The whole of intelligent investing fits in one book. This page is that book's method in a modern form, and the reason we built it.

Why this exists

Charlie Munger called most of what passes for investment wisdom twaddle: the academic models, the Wall Street noise, the complexity sold hardest by the people whose income depends on it staying complex. He and Buffett liked to say they could teach the whole subject in a single class, except that the professors would then be out of work. The truth is almost insultingly simple. A share is a piece of a business. A business is worth the cash it will hand its owners over its life. The job is to buy it for less than that, with a margin of safety. Graham wrote this down in 1949, and little of consequence has been added since.

What has changed is the noise, now at the most perverse pitch in its history. Zero-day options, an ocean of derivatives, valuations untethered from any business beneath them, an IPO and SPAC carnival, crypto, prediction markets, and a stampede into anything with “AI” stamped on it whether or not a business stands behind the letters. A whole generation has been handed gambling apps dressed up as brokerages, and almost nothing that teaches it to think like an owner. Taken together it is one large collective stain on the capital markets.

The cost is not abstract. Millions of young people now put real money to work with no instrument worthy of the decision. They were given the buttons and never the tools. This is a small attempt to push the other way.

What this is

It is not a tip service, and not a screener that hands you a verdict. It is a place to learn the few questions that actually decide whether a business is any good, applied to real companies from their own filings, with the arithmetic shown. Learn the questions here and they travel with you: the next company you open, in this catalog or not, you will know what to ask of it. The catalog is the classroom, and it is going to grow a great deal.

The method is Graham's, carried forward the way Buffett and Munger carried it. There is no sacred multiple. A wonderful business can be cheap at fifty times earnings if the reasoning holds, and a trap at ten. The two of them moved from buying fair businesses at wonderful prices to wonderful businesses at fair ones, and learned to judge a company by the durability of what it earns on its capital. All of it still holds, and none of it requires a terminal or a trading desk.

This was built by one person with a finance education and a set of AI tools, and that is part of the point. You no longer need a quant desk or a computer-science degree to build a serious instrument for thinking about businesses; that leverage is finally within reach of anyone willing to do the work. The aim is plain, and maybe a little quixotic: to set Graham's method down where this generation already spends its time, and to help raise a more intelligent generation of investors. We cannot make you a great investor. Graham's book can. We are only trying to put its method in front of you, with the means to check every figure yourself.

The few questions that matter

Every company page is built on these, in the order an owner asks them. Learn the order and you can read a 10-K you have never seen before.

  1. 1. What is this business, really?

    Before a single ratio, understand how the company turns effort into cash: what it sells, to whom, and why anyone keeps buying. Buffett's circle of competence is not a slogan. If you cannot explain the business in a sentence, you cannot value it. Each page opens by naming the economic model (asset-light, capital-intensive, brand, retail) and what moves its needle, because the questions that matter change with the model.

  2. 2. What moves the needle, and what could break it?

    Every business runs on two or three levers. For an asset-light platform it is engagement and pricing; for a capital-intensive one it is how hard the assets work and what the inputs cost; for a brand it is whether it can raise prices without losing the customer. Find those levers first. Then read what management is required, under penalty of law, to name as its risks, in its own words and never paraphrased, and weigh it. The business in brief on each page is built to do exactly this.

  3. 3. Is there a record, and is it stable?

    Graham wanted a profit in every one of the past ten years, not one good quarter. A decade of figures, taken from the filings with no estimates, tells you whether the economics are durable or whether a single chart is hiding a cycle. Look at the worst year, not the average.

  4. 4. Will it survive?

    Solvency comes first. Can a year of operating profit cover the interest many times over? Is debt small against working capital and net of cash? A business that cannot be killed never has to be timed, and most permanent losses come from leverage rather than from bad businesses.

  5. 5. Is it a good business?

    Buffett's north star is a return on invested capital that does not fade. A high return, repeated year after year, is the signature of a moat, and over time a stock tracks the returns of the business beneath it. Judge the cash on owner earnings, meaning operating cash minus the capex needed just to stand still, rather than the accountant's earnings, and treat stock compensation as the real expense it is.

  6. 6. What does management do with the cash?

    Capital allocation is, in Buffett's words, the most important job a chief executive has. Over a decade, did the cash go back into the business at high returns, out to owners as dividends and honest buybacks, or up in smoke on empire-building? The split alone does not grade management. The return earned on what gets reinvested does.

  7. 7. What are you paying?

    Price is what you give and value is what you get. We never print a fair value or a target, which is false precision dressed up as insight. Instead we turn a price into the expectation buried inside it: the owner-earnings growth, or the future profitability, you would have to believe to justify it. Then you ask for a margin of safety. Those were Graham's three most important words.

  8. 8. Refuse the verdict.

    No tool should tell you what to buy, and the ones that do are usually selling your attention. Every number here is sourced and the arithmetic is shown. The judgment is left to you on purpose, because making it yourself is the part that turns a trader into an investor.

How it is built, and why you can trust it

You should trust a research tool only as far as you can check it, so here is how this one works.

Read the originals

There is no secret here, and nothing on this page replaces the source. Read them.

  • Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor (1949), above all the chapters on Mr. Market and on margin of safety.
  • Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, Security Analysis (1934).
  • Warren Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder letters, free to read and the best finance education in print.
  • Charlie Munger, Poor Charlie's Almanack.

Read those, practice on real businesses with pages like these, and ignore almost everything else. That is the method, in full.