Screen the sector that mines, refines and processes the inputs to everything else.
Materials covers mining, chemicals, packaging and construction materials — commodity-linked businesses that supply the raw inputs the rest of the economy builds with. Prices for what they produce are set globally and cyclically, so the screen here favours low-cost, well-capitalised producers who can survive a weak part of the cycle rather than those merely riding a commodity high.
Illustrative — not investment advice.
| Ticker | Company | Sub-industry | Quality Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| LIN | Linde | Industrial gases | 6.5/10 |
| SHW | Sherwin-Williams | Paints & coatings | 6.8/10 |
| FCX | Freeport-McMoRan | Copper & gold mining | 5.1/10 |
| ECL | Ecolab | Water treatment & specialty chemicals | 6.7/10 |
| NEM | Newmont | Gold mining | 7.3/10 |
| APD | Air Products and Chemicals | Industrial gases | 1.7/10 |
| DD | DuPont de Nemours | Specialty chemicals & materials | 2.7/10 |
| CTVA | Corteva | Agricultural chemicals & seeds | 5.5/10 |
| NUE | Nucor | Steel production | 3.4/10 |
| DOW | Dow Inc. | Commodity chemicals | 2.5/10 |
| PPG | PPG Industries | Paints & coatings | 5.6/10 |
| VMC | Vulcan Materials | Construction aggregates | 6.3/10 |
Commodity earnings swing hard with price; free-cash-flow yield measured across a full cycle, not one strong year, tells you which producers are genuinely cheap versus temporarily flush.
In a commodity business, the low-cost producer survives every downturn and the high-cost producer doesn’t; cost position relative to peers is the clearest predictor of who keeps mining or making product when prices fall.
Cyclical revenue collapses fast in a downturn, so a conservative leverage load is what keeps a materials producer solvent through the trough rather than forced into a distressed capital raise.
Materials businesses require constant reinvestment in mines, plants and processing capacity; ROIC shows whether that capital is earning a real return or just maintaining output.
Copper, lithium and other metals used in electric vehicles, batteries and grid infrastructure are seeing structurally higher demand, reshaping which miners get valued as long-term growth stories versus pure cyclicals.
Steel, cement and chemicals producers are investing in lower-carbon production processes, a capital-intensive shift that is starting to separate well-funded incumbents from smaller players who can’t afford the transition.
Miners and chemical producers that got burned by over-expanding into past commodity booms are now prioritising shareholder returns and disciplined capacity additions over chasing volume growth.
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 free-cash-flow yield measured across a full commodity cycle, a low-cost competitive position, manageable leverage and solid return on invested capital. That favours producers who survive downturns over those merely riding a commodity price spike.
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. Earnings follow the commodity price, so a base case built on a peak year values a cycle rather than a company — the bear case is where a miner or a chemical producer is honestly priced. 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. Earnings swing with the commodity price as they do in energy, so the cheapest-looking P/E is usually the top of a cycle; the longer windows are where a miner or a chemical producer is honestly judged. 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 materials screen, sort it and keep it; a screen you save stays on your account.
Commodity prices are set globally and out of any single company’s control, so the producer with the lowest cost per unit is the one that stays profitable when prices fall and captures the most upside when they rise — making relative cost position one of the best predictors of long-run returns in the sector.
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.