The Combined Score is the single number at the top of every stock page — but it's built from more than just averaging six pillars together. Understanding the three adjustments layered on top is what turns it from a simple average into something that actually reflects real investment risk.
The Combined Score blends all six pillars — Profitability, Debt Safety, Earnings Quality, Growth, Valuation, and Opportunity — into one 0–100 figure, then applies three specific adjustments described below. It is deliberately not a plain weighted average.
An excellent company at an absurd price and a mediocre company at a fair price can average out to look identical on a plain weighted average — and that's genuinely misleading, since the two situations carry very different risk. The Combined Score is built specifically to avoid smoothing this kind of disagreement away, which is exactly why the three adjustments below exist.
After the weighted blend above, three further adjustments are applied:
The Quality Score is a separate, related figure worth knowing about — it blends five pillars (everything except Valuation) into its own 0–100 measure of how good the business itself is, independent of price:
Reading Quality and Combined Score together tells you more than either alone: a high Quality Score paired with a much lower Combined Score usually means the stock is expensive relative to that quality; a Combined Score close to Quality usually means the valuation isn't distorting the overall picture much either way.
"Meridian Consumer Brands" (illustrative) scores Profitability 82, Debt Safety 88, Earnings Quality 79, Growth 71, Valuation 68, and Opportunity 55 — with Quality and Valuation reasonably close together, so no disagreement penalty applies, and High data confidence:
With every pillar reasonably strong and no wide gap between Quality and Valuation, the weighted blend alone lands close to the final figure — no adjustment needed to pull it down.
"Northgate Software" (illustrative) has an excellent Quality profile — Profitability 91, Debt Safety 85, Earnings Quality 88, Growth 88, Opportunity 70 — but a Valuation score of just 22, reflecting a very expensive price. The gap between Quality (roughly 84) and Valuation (22) is 62 points, well past the 55 threshold:
Without the adjustment, the strong Quality pillars would have pulled this to a misleadingly comfortable 73. The disagreement penalty brings it down to reflect the genuine risk of paying an excellent price for an excellent business that's priced for perfection.
"Coastal Steel Works" (illustrative) trades at a strikingly low valuation, earning a Valuation score of 90 — but its underlying Quality Score is only 30, reflecting weak profitability, thin earnings quality, and a stretched balance sheet.
Even though the weighted math alone would have produced something closer to 58, the value-trap floor overrides it — a genuinely poor business doesn't become a good holding just because it's cheap, and the floor exists specifically to prevent an attractive-looking price from masking that reality.
Because a plain average can hide exactly the situation that matters most — an excellent company at a terrible price averaging out to look the same as a mediocre company at a fair one. The three adjustments exist specifically to surface that disagreement rather than smooth it away.
A Quality Score below 35 caps the Combined Score at 45 regardless of how attractive the valuation looks; a Quality Score below 45 caps it at 55. Both exist to stop a cheap price from disguising a genuinely weak business.
Up to a 12% reduction for Very Low confidence companies (those with the least financial history), scaling down gradually through Low, Medium, and Medium-High before reaching no reduction at all for High confidence.
Yes — the same final number can come from very different underlying pillar profiles. One stock might reach a given score through excellent profitability and a fair price; another might reach the identical score through a merely average business at an exceptionally cheap valuation. The pillar breakdown, not just the headline number, tells you which situation you're actually looking at.
It can — since it's built from the same underlying pillar scores, which themselves update as new quarterly or annual results come in, the Combined Score naturally moves too, sometimes meaningfully if a company's latest results were unusually strong, weak, or shifted the balance between Quality and Valuation.
A high Combined Score is a genuinely strong signal, but it's still a summary of past and current fundamentals, not a prediction or investment advice. Checking the individual pillar breakdown behind the number, and understanding what's actually driving it, is worth doing before treating any single score as the whole picture.
The full formula, including precise adjustment thresholds, is published on the How Our Scores Work page.