Did the stock ratings work? The first scoreboard
tickerseer stamps a rating on every stock it tracks: Strong Buy, Buy, Neutral, Caution, or Avoid. This study scores all of them. The rating ledger has recorded live since August 3, 2026, so that month is the real record; the June and July figures replay today's rating rules against archived weekly data and are labeled as a backtest wherever they appear. Nothing in the backtest is a call we published at the time.
The short answer
The ratings sorted the market in the right order. Across all 23 weekly snapshots in the ledger, live and backtest alike, stocks rated Strong Buy went on to beat stocks rated Avoid, by 10.7 percentage points on average. The group rated Strong Buy or Buy finished ahead of the S&P 500 index (measured as SPY) in 21 of those 23 snapshots. The two misses were the youngest snapshots, held a week or less.
That is the whole claim. Not that every Strong Buy went up (one in four did not), and not that the ratings time the market (they do not try). A rating is a sorting device, and over these two months it sorted.
This is a measurement of recent market history, not advice, and two months is a short window. The limits section below is part of the finding.
What a rating is
Every rating is computed by fixed rules from a stock's published metrics: quality score, forward return estimate, valuation against its own history, growth, and a momentum adjustment. No person and no language model picks the label. The same rules run for every stock, roughly 1,600 of them in a recent week, and the criteria behind each label are printed on the stock's own page.
Since August 3, 2026 every weekly rating has been written to an append-only ledger the moment it is published, with the price it was formed against. The database refuses edits to a recorded rating, and correcting one is a deliberate, documented act rather than an edit in place. That matters for a scoreboard like this one: the August rows below are the ratings as they were recorded on publication day, not reconstructions made for this study.
How we measured it
For each weekly snapshot, we took every stock's rating and measured its price change from the first close on or after the snapshot date through August 28, 2026, using split- and dividend-adjusted closes. Each rating group is an equal-weighted average of its stocks, with no transaction costs. The benchmark is SPY over the same window with the same entry and exit rule.
Four stocks (BYND, CXAI, MNST, TNON) were excluded because the price vendor served corrupted daily bars around stock splits: their series show symmetric drops and rebounds of about 50% on consecutive sessions, which measure the corruption rather than the stock. Twelve more had no usable price history, mostly delistings and renames. Everything else in the ledger is counted, winners and losers alike.
The live month, as published
The ledger's first live snapshot is August 3, 2026: 1,192 rated stocks, held just under four weeks to August 28. These are ratings that were on the site, recorded the day they appeared.
| Rating | Stocks | Average return | Median return |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strong Buy | 32 | +7.5% | +9.4% |
| Buy | 92 | +4.0% | +2.2% |
| Neutral | 606 | +3.1% | +0.7% |
| Caution | 174 | −0.1% | −0.6% |
| Avoid | 288 | −0.7% | −1.2% |
Top to bottom, that is the order the labels claim. The later August snapshots are younger and noisier, but the Avoid group earned its keep in the weeks that went nowhere: in the flat mid-August weeks, stocks rated Avoid lost between 2.8% and 4.5% on average while SPY was roughly unchanged.
June and July, replayed as a backtest
The ledger did not exist before August 3, so there is no live record to score for June and July. What we can do, and label honestly, is run today's rating rules against the archived weekly data from those months and score the result. That is a backtest: it shows how the current rules would have sorted those stocks, not what anyone saw on the site at the time.
The snapshot from July 2 is the one closest to a two-month hold. Measured through August 28, against SPY at +3.3%:
| Rating | Stocks | Average return | Share that rose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Strong Buy | 15 | +11.9% | 80% |
| Buy | 40 | +11.5% | 68% |
| Neutral | 223 | +5.6% | 63% |
| Caution | 110 | +0.5% | 44% |
| Avoid | 146 | −2.4% | 41% |
The longer June snapshots tell the same story: from June 3, twelve weeks out, the Strong Buy group averaged +14.5% while the Avoid group averaged −1.7%, in a period when SPY gained 2.3%. Every one of the backtest snapshots kept Strong Buy ahead of Avoid.
Did Strong Buy and Buy beat the index?
Yes, in 21 of 23 snapshots. We pooled each snapshot's Strong Buy and Buy stocks into one buy-rated group and compared its equal-weighted return to SPY over the same window. The two snapshots that missed were the two youngest, from August 21 and August 24, where the holding period was a week or less and the gap to SPY was under one percentage point.
In the live ledger specifically, the buy-rated group beat SPY in three of the four published snapshots: +4.9% against +1.5% from August 3, +1.9% against −0.5% from August 10, and +0.5% against −0.4% from August 17. The August 24 snapshot trailed, +0.4% against +0.8%, after four trading days.
What this cannot tell you
Two months is a short test, run in a mostly rising market. A sorting signal that holds up in one regime can weaken in another, and nothing here shows how these ratings behave in a sustained decline.
The 23 snapshots overlap. A stock rated Avoid in June was usually still rated Avoid in July, so these are not 23 independent trials and should not be read as such.
June and July are a backtest. Today's rules were tuned on the recent past, so replaying them over that same past flatters them in ways we cannot fully unwind. The live month is the cleaner evidence, and it is one month.
Group averages are equal-weighted with no transaction costs, and dividends are included. A real portfolio would weight positions, pay spreads, and act later than the snapshot date. And ratings move weekly: this study froze each snapshot and held it, which is not how the site presents them day to day.
Frequently asked
Are these real trades?
No. This is a measurement of price changes for rated stocks, equal-weighted within each rating group, with no transaction costs. Nothing here was bought or sold.
Why are June and July labeled a backtest?
The live rating ledger began on August 3, 2026. Earlier rows were reconstructed by running today's rating rules against archived weekly data, so they show what the rules would have said, not what the site displayed at the time. We label the two records separately and score them separately.
What was excluded from the measurement?
Four stocks whose vendor price data was corrupted around stock splits (BYND, CXAI, MNST, TNON) and twelve with no usable price history, mostly delistings and renames. Every other rating in the ledger is counted, including every loser.
Where can I see the ratings now?
Every public stock page on tickerseer shows the stock's current rating with the criteria that produced it, and the ledger keeps recording weekly, win or lose.
Will a Strong Buy rating make money?
Not reliably, no. In the live month, one Strong Buy stock in four lost value. The finding is that the rating groups finished in the right order on average, which is a claim about sorting, not a promise about any single stock.