Methodology

Seven investor frameworks, one transparent scorecard

Every US-listed stock on invest-like gets graded against seven named-investor frameworks. Each one has its own pillars, its own signals, and its own deliberate blind spots. A stock that passes six of the seven has converging evidence the way no single framework can produce.

7frameworks0-100score per frameworkA+ to Dgrade ladder

Last reviewed: May 25, 2026

The frameworks

What each lens looks for

Skim the seven. Notice that several flag the same stocks for different reasons, and that several explicitly refuse to look at the same stock. The cross-framework consensus is what an individual lens cannot give you.

Buffett

Warren Buffett

Long-term quality compounding with a margin of safety.

What it looks for

Economic moat - ROIC > 15%, gross margin > 40% in a thin-margin sector, brand or network-effect evidence.
Durable demand - the product still matters in 10-20 years and survives at least one downturn intact.
Owner-friendly management - insider ownership, buybacks at low prices, plain-English shareholder letters.
Financial health + reasonable valuation - net debt / EBITDA < 2x, owner-earnings yield comparable to 10y Treasury + risk premium.

What it deliberately passes on

Early-stage growth, deep cyclicals, anything with regulatory tail risk. Buffett would rather own boring durable cash flow than spectacular but fragile growth.

Read the deep dive on Buffett

Graham

Benjamin Graham

Defensive deep value with a quantitative margin of safety.

What it looks for

Earnings stability - 10 consecutive years of positive earnings, no major loss years.
Conservative balance sheet - current ratio > 2, long-term debt below net working capital.
Dividend record - uninterrupted dividends for 20+ years where applicable.
Modest valuation - P/E (3y average) < 15, P/B < 1.5, combined P/E * P/B < 22.5 (Graham number).

What it deliberately passes on

Growth premiums of any kind, technology that hasn't proven a multi-decade earnings record, asset-light businesses where book value understates intrinsic value.

Fisher

Philip Fisher

Scuttlebutt-driven growth quality - what insiders and customers actually say.

What it looks for

Growth runway - revenue is compounding because the underlying market is still expanding, not because of share-take in a flat market.
Above-average R&D and salesforce productivity for the industry.
Management depth - the company functions without the founder being in every meeting.
Profit margins improving with scale, not deteriorating - efficient growth is the test.

What it deliberately passes on

Asset-heavy or commodity businesses where reinvested R&D can't compound. Fisher's 15-point checklist is built for businesses whose value comes from accumulated process knowledge, not balance sheet.

Lynch

Peter Lynch

Growth at a reasonable price (GARP) - the PEG-ratio framework.

What it looks for

PEG ratio < 1 - earnings growth matches or exceeds the P/E multiple, so growth is priced reasonably.
Earnings growth 15-25%/yr (the sweet spot - faster gets fragile, slower isn't a compounder).
Comprehensible business - Lynch's famous rule: 'invest in what you know'. No black-box financial engineering.
Insider buying + low institutional ownership - undiscovered names beat over-owned ones.

What it deliberately passes on

Hyper-growth (>50%/yr) where the next year's earnings can collapse, and zero-growth businesses with no catalyst. Lynch's stage 2 'fast growers' are the home run; stage 6 'turnarounds' are the lottery ticket.

Greenblatt

Joel Greenblatt

Magic Formula - rank the universe on capital efficiency + cheapness, buy the top decile.

What it looks for

High ROIC (Greenblatt's quality proxy - return on capital actually employed in the business).
High earnings yield (EBIT / Enterprise Value, his cheapness proxy - cleaner than P/E because it neutralises capital structure).
Combined rank: top 30-50 names by sum of ROIC rank + earnings-yield rank.
Mid-to-large cap (Greenblatt screens out micro-caps to keep the universe trade-able).

What it deliberately passes on

Banks, insurance, utilities, REITs - the framework is built for operating businesses with comparable capital bases. It's also a rules-based screen, not a qualitative read, so it intentionally ignores moat and management.

Munger

Charlie Munger

Quality + simple businesses + almost no debt - the strictest filter of the seven.

What it looks for

Very high quality - ROE > 20%, ROIC > 15%, stable margins through cycles, no accounting acrobatics.
Almost no debt - Munger explicitly preferred zero leverage where possible; net debt > 1x EBITDA fails this lens.
Simple, understandable business model - if the IR slide deck needs more than one diagram to explain the unit economics, it fails.
Multi-decade demand stability - same test as Buffett's durability pillar but applied more strictly.

What it deliberately passes on

Anything Munger would call 'too hard' - financial engineering, biotech binaries, heavy regulatory exposure, leveraged compounders. The Munger lens is the closest invest-like has to a hard-pass filter, not a search.

T. Smith

Terry Smith (Fundsmith)

Quality compounders - own businesses that turn cash into more cash year after year.

What it looks for

Free cash flow conversion > 90% - reported earnings show up as cash, not working-capital fictions.
Return on capital employed (ROCE) > 25% consistently - high quality, not just high growth.
Pricing power - revenue grows ahead of inflation without volume tricks.
Capital-light economics - growth doesn't require huge ongoing capex; the business compounds on its own cash.

What it deliberately passes on

Anything cyclical, anything with low FCF conversion, anything that needs balance-sheet leverage to hit the ROE target. Smith's framework is the 'never disturb compound interest' framework - it deliberately excludes the entire value-investing universe Graham is searching in.

Why seven, not one

The cross-framework consensus

A stock that scores well on Buffett is a quality compounder bought at a fair price. A stock that scores well on Graham is statistically cheap with a defensible balance sheet. A stock that scores well on Lynch is growing into its multiple. These are different bets.

A stock that scores well on six or seven of the seven is something else: a name where the strongest published value-investing lenses converge despite having different criteria and different blind spots. That convergence is rare, hard to fake by tilting one ratio, and the clearest signal a quantitative screen can produce.

The backtested track record shows what the best-of-7 cohort actually did over the last five years. Numbers come from the same engine that grades the stocks on the site, run on archived fundamentals. The full cross-framework consensus scoring system is documented in a peer-reviewable working paper at /papers/ (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20393518). Educational only.

Working papers

The methodology is documented with permanent DOIs

The cross-framework consensus scoring system and the AAOIFI Standard 21 halal implementation are both published as peer-reviewable working papers with permanent DOIs on Zenodo and working-paper IDs on SSRN. The methodology you read on this page is the same methodology cited in those papers, line for line.

Cross-Framework Consensus Scoring System for US-Listed Equities
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20393518 · SSRN 6831462
Computational Implementation of AAOIFI Standard 21 for US Public Equities
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20393706 · SSRN 6831538

Read the working papers

See it on a real stock

Every ticker on invest-like carries all seven framework grades plus the cross-framework consensus. No paywall on the grades themselves - that is the methodology in action.

See AAPL across all 7 Deep dive: the Buffett-Fit Score

Seven investor frameworks, one transparent scorecard

7frameworks0-100score per frameworkA+ to Dgrade ladder

Last reviewed: May 25, 2026

The cross-framework consensus

The methodology is documented with permanent DOIs

Cross-Framework Consensus Scoring System for US-Listed Equities
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20393518 · SSRN 6831462

Computational Implementation of AAOIFI Standard 21 for US Public Equities
DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20393706 · SSRN 6831538