Screen the sector that turns clinical pipelines and payer scale into durable earnings.
Healthcare covers pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, medical devices, health insurers and hospital systems — businesses whose returns hinge on patent cycles, regulatory approval and reimbursement economics rather than the broader economic cycle. That defensiveness is real, but pipeline risk and policy headlines can swing a stock hard, so screening on margin durability and pipeline-adjusted cash flow matters more here than in most sectors.
Illustrative — not investment advice.
| Ticker | Company | Sub-industry | Quality Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| LLY | Eli Lilly | Pharmaceuticals | 7.0/10 |
| UNH | UnitedHealth Group | Managed care & health insurance | 5.7/10 |
| JNJ | Johnson & Johnson | Pharmaceuticals & medical devices | 6.3/10 |
| ABBV | AbbVie | Biopharmaceuticals | 5.5/10 |
| MRK | Merck & Co. | Pharmaceuticals | 5.0/10 |
| ABT | Abbott Laboratories | Medical devices & diagnostics | 5.6/10 |
| TMO | Thermo Fisher Scientific | Life-sciences tools & diagnostics | — |
| PFE | Pfizer | Pharmaceuticals | 3.6/10 |
| DHR | Danaher | Life-sciences & diagnostics equipment | 5.1/10 |
| ISRG | Intuitive Surgical | Surgical robotics & medical devices | 6.9/10 |
| AMGN | Amgen | Biotechnology | 5.9/10 |
| CVS | CVS Health | Pharmacy, health insurance & care delivery | 4.5/10 |
Pipeline reinvestment is the lifeblood of pharma and biotech; screening on R&D intensity relative to peers highlights companies funding their next decade of growth.
Patent-protected drugs and dominant device franchises carry high operating margins — a floor here filters out commoditised generics and thin-margin distributors.
Free-cash-flow yield shows whether approved products and installed device bases are actually converting to cash, not just pipeline promises.
Large healthcare M&A is often debt-funded; a leverage ceiling avoids balance sheets stretched by acquisitions ahead of the payoff.
A handful of obesity and diabetes drugs have become some of the best-selling medicines ever, concentrating pharma earnings growth in the companies that got there first.
Managed-care insurers are navigating rising medical-cost trends, pushing screens toward insurers with disciplined underwriting and diversified revenue beyond premiums.
A wave of blockbuster drugs are losing exclusivity this decade; screening on pipeline depth helps separate companies replacing lost revenue from those simply managing decline.
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 durable operating margins, disciplined R&D reinvestment, strong free-cash-flow yield and manageable leverage. That favours companies with either protected drug franchises or dominant device and diagnostics installed bases over commoditised players.
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. Large pharma is the rare company where all four apply at once; a pre-revenue biotech has no free cash flow for a discount rate to act on, and the tab says so rather than printing a figure anyway. 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. Patent cycles make reported earnings lumpy, so a P/E can flatter one year and condemn the next; the cash-flow and EBITDA lenses read steadier here, and large pharma is one of the few places in the market where the dividend lens has something to say. 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 healthcare screen, sort it and keep it; a screen you save stays on your account.
Demand for medicine and care is non-cyclical, which cushions revenue in a downturn. But a single clinical trial readout or regulatory decision can move a stock sharply, so position sizing and margin-of-safety discipline matter as much as the defensive label.
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.