Screen the sector where balance-sheet quality, not the income statement, decides the winners.
Financials cover banks, insurers, asset managers and payment processors — businesses that earn a spread or a fee on other people’s money. Because the balance sheet itself is the product, screening here leans on capital adequacy and returns on equity rather than the revenue-growth metrics that dominate other sectors, and a rate cycle can swing sector-wide earnings almost overnight.
Illustrative — not investment advice.
| Ticker | Company | Sub-industry | Quality Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| BRK.B | Berkshire Hathaway | Diversified insurance & holding company | — |
| JPM | JPMorgan Chase | Diversified banking | 5.5/10 |
| V | Visa | Payment networks | 8.5/10 |
| MA | Mastercard | Payment networks | 8.6/10 |
| BAC | Bank of America | Diversified banking | 4.9/10 |
| WFC | Wells Fargo | Diversified banking | 3.8/10 |
| GS | Goldman Sachs | Investment banking & trading | 2.9/10 |
| MS | Morgan Stanley | Investment banking & wealth management | 3.6/10 |
| SPGI | S&P Global | Credit ratings & financial data | 7.4/10 |
| BLK | BlackRock | Asset management | 6.4/10 |
| AXP | American Express | Payments & consumer credit | 7.1/10 |
| C | Citigroup | Diversified banking | 3.0/10 |
ROE is the core profitability yardstick for banks and insurers, showing how efficiently a franchise turns shareholder capital into earnings.
For lenders, the spread between what they earn on assets and pay on deposits drives the bulk of earnings — a key filter as rate cycles turn.
Book value anchors bank and insurer valuation in a way earnings multiples don’t; screening on P/B flags franchises trading cheap relative to tangible capital.
Capital adequacy is the buffer against a bad cycle; a strong ratio screens out banks one downturn away from raising dilutive capital.
As policy rates move, net interest margins for banks and float income for insurers move with them, making the sector unusually sensitive to the interest-rate outlook.
Card networks keep taking share from cash across emerging markets, compounding transaction volume with minimal incremental capital.
Scale advantages in technology and compliance costs are pushing smaller lenders toward mergers, concentrating deposits among larger, better-capitalised franchises.
Each one opens the screener with these filters already on the bar — change any of them, or save the screen under your own name.
Income first — a dividend-yield floor, with valuation and free-cash-flow filters to screen out yield traps.
Durable, capital-efficient businesses: high returns on capital and fat margins, still growing.
Smaller companies compounding revenue faster than the market has noticed, and paying for themselves in cash.
Every card above opens the screener with the sector filter and its own bounds already on the bar. Change any of them — nothing here is fixed.
Stack valuation, profitability, growth, dividend and financial-health filters. Each one is a range with presets, the table answers as you move a bound, and every filter says how many companies it excluded for want of a value.
Open any survivor for the four intrinsic-value models, then save it to a watchlist with a margin-of-safety target so each name carries an undervalued / fair / rich signal.
Screen for strong return on equity, healthy net interest margin (for lenders), reasonable price-to-book and solid capital ratios. Together these flag well-capitalised franchises earning durable returns rather than banks chasing growth with thin buffers.
Open the company’s Intrinsic Value tab: Lemma Analysis prices it four ways at once — Advanced DCF, Ben Graham, Simple DCF and the Dividend Discount Model — and draws all four on one axis against today’s price, with every assumption editable and a bear/base/bull case behind each one. There is deliberately no blended figure; which methods fit the company is stated instead, with the reason beside any that does not. Here the exception matters most: an unlevered cash-flow build is the wrong tool on a bank, where debt is the raw material rather than the financing, so the dividend model and Graham’s formula are the ones to read. Intrinsic Value is free for 3 companies a day with no account needed, and unlimited on Ultimate, which every new account gets for seven days without a card.
There is no one answer for a sector, and a page that gave you one would be stating a figure it cannot keep true. What the Fair Value tab does instead is ask it per company: seven multiples — P/E, Yield, P/FCF, P/OCF, P/S, EV/EBITDA and P/B — each measured against that company’s own history, so today’s reading is a percentile of what the market has actually paid for it rather than a comparison with a sector average. Book value is the lens that matters on a bank, because the balance sheet is the business. The EBITDA lens is set aside entirely — enterprise value means nothing where debt is raw material rather than financing. Fair Value is free for 3 companies a day with no account needed, and unlimited on Ultimate, which every new account gets for seven days without a card.
Yes — the screener is part of Ultimate. Every new account gets Ultimate for seven days with no credit card, which is enough to build a financials screen, sort it and keep it; a screen you save stays on your account.
A bank or insurer’s balance sheet — its loans, securities and reserves — is close to its actual business, unlike, say, a software company whose value is mostly intangible. That makes book value a more reliable valuation anchor here than in most sectors.
The screener is part of Ultimate, and every new account gets it for seven days: create an account, confirm your email, and the trial starts without a card. What you have built stays yours either way — a screen is an address, so the link you saved keeps working the day you subscribe.