Reading LENS

The SYMBOL card reads one stock at a time. LENS reads the whole market at once — you take two of the card's four scores, put one on each axis, and every stock lands somewhere on the resulting map. Where a stock sits tells you its character at a glance, and the four corners of the map are four different kinds of stock.

You build the map yourself. Pick any two of Perform, Persist, Profit, and Pressure — the same four scores at the top of every card — for the X and Y axes, and the whole field replots around your choice.

A quick example: put Perform (price strength) on one axis and Profit (business strength) on the other. The top-right corner is the stocks strong on both — genuine leaders. Top-left is strong business, weak price — overlooked names. Bottom-right is strong price, weak business — froth. Bottom-left is weak on both — laggards. One map, four populations, read in a glance.

How to read a map

Every map is the full 0-to-100 grid, split in four by a crosshair at the middle. A few rules make the corners trustworthy:

• Both legs have to be strong. A stock scores by the weakest-link average of its two axes, so a strong-on-one, weak-on-the-other name lands low — not in the middle. To reach a strong corner it has to earn both.
• Pick axes that don't overlap. The four scores are nearly independent of one another — Persist especially is almost unrelated to the rest — so most pairings fill all four corners instead of smearing everything along one diagonal.
• Every axis is a score from the card. No cheapness, no hidden ratios — only the four reads you can see on the SYMBOL card. So a stock that lights up here reads green when you open it. What you see is what you get.
• No guessing. If a stock is missing one of the two scores, it sits the map out rather than getting a made-up position.

Each chip is tinted by its 30-day price change — bright red through white to bright green — so recent momentum reads as color while position reads as character. Two header toggles, High FLOW and Low RISK, thin the field to the sturdiest names; a sector dropdown narrows it further. Hover any chip for its preview card; click to open the full SYMBOL card.

The lit corner, and its Top Picks

The both-strong corner — top-right — is highlighted, and the names in it are ranked into a Top Picks list beside the map, best-fit first. A one-year, equal-weighted backtest of that basket against SPY sits underneath, so you can see how the corner has carried recently. But the real value is reading all four corners and letting the structure pose the question — the lit corner is just where the map points first.

Five pairings worth a look

You can build any of the six pairings, but five stand out — each answers a different question. The tables below pull the top 20 names in each one's lit corner, ranked by how squarely they fit it, with the live price action beside each. Five shortlists, refreshed with the data, that shift as the market does — a starting point for your own digging, not a buy list.

• Persist × Perform → Durable winners — a trend that holds a top rank week after week and is beating the market.
• Persist × Profit → Compounders — that durable trend backed by a genuinely improving business.
• Persist × Pressure → Conviction — a durable trend with money concentrating behind it on up-days.
• Perform × Profit → Leaders — strong price performance paired with an improving business.
• Perform × Pressure → Confirmed — outperformance the volume is backing.

The fit score (0–100) is how squarely a stock sits in the lit corner; the 1D / 1W / 1M / 1Y columns are the price action behind it — context, not the input.

Does it actually work?

The honest test: if you held the top names of a map's lit corner for a month and rebalanced, would you beat the market? We ran exactly that over 19 years, on a point-in-time S&P 500 — no hindsight about which companies would survive:

Each pairing produces a modest, real edge — not a money machine. The strongest is durable price leadership paired with persistence; price strength gated by business strength comes next, because it filters out the empty-momentum names. These are genuine but sub-spectacular, with real drawdowns — exactly what you'd expect from a tool that narrows the field rather than one that picks winners for you.

What LENS is for (and isn't)

A map is a landscape, not a portfolio. You read all four corners — the leaders, the overlooked, the froth, the laggards — and let the structure point you at the question worth asking right now. Then you open the individual cards and apply your own judgment. That's the opposite of "buy the top 20 mechanically every month."

So LENS is a place to find ideas, not a strategy to run. (Where LENS is the map, SCREEN is the list — the same scores, used to filter instead of to plot.) The strongest pairing here is, in fact, the seed of one of the disciplined strategies we run elsewhere — but turning a good map corner into something you'd actually trade takes far more than the corner itself provides. The map shows you the character; deciding what to own is still your call.

Why there's no bargain map

You might expect a cheap-stocks map — low P/E, high cash-flow yield. There isn't one, on purpose. Every LENS axis has to be a score the SYMBOL card shows, and the card deliberately leaves valuation off (it ranks on character, not raw multiples). A bargain map would light up names that look weak on everything the card does show — the exact disconnect LENS is built to avoid.