Value stock screener output only carries meaning once you know which definition of value the tool encoded, and the tool rarely says. One rule set calls a company cheap because its net current assets exceed its whole market value. Another calls a different company cheap because it earns a high return on equity while trading on a moderate multiple. Both are sold as value screening. This article measures how far apart their answers land.
The measurement uses eight value screens running against the same universe on the same date, which removes the usual excuse that two screeners disagreed because they looked at different companies.
Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast, and no company named below is being suggested to anyone. A full disclosure sits at the foot of this article.
Value stock screener definitions: what each rule set actually tests
Every screen below is described somewhere as a value screen. The middle columns are what separates them.
| Value screen | The test at its core | Rules | Rules comparing price to a fundamental | Passing |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enterprising Investor | Five years of dividends and profits, growth, liquidity, leverage | 5 | 0 | 102 |
| Acquirers Multiple | Earnings yield at or above 15%, above a market cap floor | 2 | 1 | 75 |
| Graham Net-Net (NCAV) | Net current asset value at or above 1.5 times market cap | 1 | 1 | 43 |
| Buffett Quality | Return on equity, net margin, low debt, five-year EPS growth | 5 | 0 | 16 |
| Neff Value | Dividend yield at or above 2%, positive P/E at or below 15 | 4 | 3 | 10 |
| Magic Formula | Earnings yield above 10%, return on invested capital above 20% | 2 | 1 | 8 |
| Quality at Reasonable Price | ROE at or above 20% and revenue growth, positive P/E at or below 20 | 6 | 2 | 5 |
| Defensive Investor | Ten-year dividend and earnings records, EPS growth, current ratio, leverage | 5 | 0 | 3 |
Thirty rules sit in that table. Eight of them compare a price to a fundamental, whether as a yield, a multiple or an asset value. The other twenty two are tests of profitability, growth, leverage, liquidity or payment history, and they would return the same verdict if the share price doubled overnight. Two counting notes belong with that split. The Acquirers Multiple market capitalization floor is counted as a size filter rather than a valuation test, even though market capitalization does move with price, because it compares a company against a fixed dollar amount and not against any figure of its own. And the earnings yield metric on this platform behaves as the reciprocal of the trailing price to earnings ratio rather than as Greenblatt's operating earnings over enterprise value: of the 2,111 companies in this run carrying a positive P/E, 2,102 store an earnings yield within 0.005 of one divided by that P/E, and all nine exceptions store an earnings yield of exactly zero.
A caution belongs beside every row rather than a selected few. GuruScreens is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any investor named on these screens. Each rule set is a GuruScreens interpretation of a publicly described method, not a rule set the named investor wrote. Several interpretations depart from the published method in ways worth knowing. Joel Greenblatt ranks companies on two measures and sets financials and utilities aside rather than applying two fixed floors. Tobias Carlisle's acquirer's multiple is enterprise value divided by operating earnings, which is not the earnings yield floor in the row above. The Graham rows compress descriptive, multi part published criteria into small sets of numeric tests. Read the rule, never the name printed above it.
This is the sourcing for every figure in this article. The numbers come from the GuruScreens runs effective 1 August 2026, each of which evaluated the same 3,787 US-listed companies, plus the stored monthly run histories behind those screens. In the product interface, the rule sets, the exact thresholds, the total pass count per screen, the top five passing companies and the list of stored runs with each run's count are open on the free tier, while the complete passing lists and the membership of past runs are Pro features. The overlap arithmetic below needs those complete lists, so GuruScreens computed it from its own screening records. The screens rebuild every month, so every count here moves.
The overlap test: 262 places, 238 companies
Run all eight screens on the same 3,787 companies and you fill 262 places. Those 262 places are held by 238 distinct companies, so the entire eight screen library repeats itself twenty four times.
| Number of screens a company passes | Companies |
|---|---|
| Exactly one | 217 |
| Exactly two | 18 |
| Exactly three | 3 |
| Four or more | 0 |
That is the finding in one table. Of the 238 companies any value screen selected on 1 August 2026, 91.2% were selected by exactly one of the eight. Not one company cleared four rule sets. Three cleared three: Evercore Inc. (EVR) on Enterprising Investor, Defensive Investor and Buffett Quality, Zevra Therapeutics, Inc. (ZVRA) on Acquirers Multiple, Magic Formula and Quality at Reasonable Price, and International Seaways, Inc. (INSW) on Acquirers Multiple, Neff Value and Enterprising Investor.
The union is also worth holding in mind for a different reason. Those 238 companies are 6.3% of the 3,787 evaluated. Eight separate value definitions applied at once still exclude more than nine companies in ten, so the disagreement is not a matter of loose screens catching everything.
Which pairs of value screens actually agree
There are 28 possible pairs among eight screens. Thirteen of them share at least one company. Fifteen share none at all.
| Screen pair | Shared companies | Names |
|---|---|---|
| Acquirers Multiple and Magic Formula | 6 | CRMD, EVER, HRB, IRWD, SABR, ZVRA |
| Enterprising Investor and Buffett Quality | 4 | EVR, LRCX, NVDA, UI |
| Enterprising Investor and Defensive Investor | 3 | DDS, EVR, GWW |
| Acquirers Multiple and Neff Value | 2 | INSW, TASK |
| Acquirers Multiple and Enterprising Investor | 2 | DAN, INSW |
| Acquirers Multiple and Buffett Quality | 2 | INVA, LE |
| Buffett Quality and Quality at Reasonable Price | 2 | ESTC, WDC |
| Defensive Investor and Buffett Quality | 1 | EVR |
| Graham Net-Net and Quality at Reasonable Price | 1 | FBIO |
| Acquirers Multiple and Quality at Reasonable Price | 1 | ZVRA |
| Magic Formula and Neff Value | 1 | NRT |
| Magic Formula and Quality at Reasonable Price | 1 | ZVRA |
| Neff Value and Enterprising Investor | 1 | INSW |
The largest single agreement in the library is six companies, between two screens that both run an earnings yield floor. Even there the sets are mostly disjoint, because Acquirers Multiple returned 75 names and Magic Formula returned 8, so their union is 77 and their intersection is 6.
The fifteen empty pairs are the more useful half of the result. In full, these pairs of value screens returned no company in common at all on 1 August 2026.
- Graham Net-Net and Acquirers Multiple
- Graham Net-Net and Magic Formula
- Graham Net-Net and Neff Value
- Graham Net-Net and Enterprising Investor
- Graham Net-Net and Defensive Investor
- Graham Net-Net and Buffett Quality
- Acquirers Multiple and Defensive Investor
- Magic Formula and Enterprising Investor
- Magic Formula and Defensive Investor
- Magic Formula and Buffett Quality
- Neff Value and Defensive Investor
- Neff Value and Buffett Quality
- Neff Value and Quality at Reasonable Price
- Enterprising Investor and Quality at Reasonable Price
- Defensive Investor and Quality at Reasonable Price
Graham Net-Net accounts for six of the fifteen on its own, sharing nothing with any screen except the hybrid one. These are not near misses caused by a threshold set slightly too tight. They are rule sets that ask unrelated questions.
Three of the eight screens contain no valuation rule at all
This is the mechanism behind the pattern, and it is visible on the screen pages before any list is opened.
Buffett Quality evaluates five rules: eps_growth_5y >= 0.05, roe >= 0.15, debt_to_equity at or below 0.5, debt_to_equity >= 0 and net_profit_margin >= 0.2. None of them looks at the share price. Enterprising Investor evaluates a five year dividend record, a five year record of positive EPS, EPS above its level five years earlier, a current ratio and a long term debt test against net current assets. None of those looks at the share price either. Defensive Investor runs the same five shapes on longer records and a stricter current ratio, and again none of them looks at the share price.
So a company can pass a screen filed under value investing while trading at any multiple whatsoever. That is not a hypothetical. Buffett Quality's 16 passing companies on 1 August 2026 included NVIDIA Corp (NVDA), Alphabet Inc. (GOOG), Netflix Inc (NFLX), Intuit Inc. (INTU), Micron Technology Inc (MU) and Lam Research Corp (LRCX). Each of those names is the arithmetic consequence of a rule set that tests margins, returns, leverage and growth and never asks what you pay for them.
Whether that is a flaw depends entirely on what you wanted. A screen for durable business quality is a legitimate and useful thing, and it is a large part of what the investor whose name sits on that screen has described looking for. It is simply not a cheapness test, and calling the output a value stock screener result invites the reader to assume a valuation filter that is not present. The rule by rule pass and fail breakdown goes further into how a single rule can do most of the eliminating on a screen like this one.
The bridge between cheap and good is four companies wide
Split the library by that mechanism. Four screens lead with a price comparison: Graham Net-Net, Acquirers Multiple, Magic Formula and Neff Value. Three screens contain no price comparison: Defensive Investor, Enterprising Investor and Buffett Quality. Quality at Reasonable Price sits deliberately in between, pairing a return on equity floor with a price to earnings ceiling.
| Group | Screens | Places filled | Distinct companies |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price led | Graham Net-Net, Acquirers Multiple, Magic Formula, Neff Value | 136 | 127 |
| No price rule | Defensive Investor, Enterprising Investor, Buffett Quality | 121 | 114 |
| Hybrid | Quality at Reasonable Price | 5 | 5 |
Four companies appear in both the price led group and the no price group: Dana Inc (DAN), International Seaways, Inc. (INSW), Innoviva, Inc. (INVA) and Lands' End, Inc. (LE). Four out of 238. They are the only companies that appear on both a price led screen and a screen carrying no price rule at all. One clarification matters here, because several screens combine both kinds of rule internally: Magic Formula pairs an earnings yield floor with a return on capital floor, and the hybrid screen pairs a price ceiling with a return on equity floor. Any company passing one of those screens has therefore cleared a price rule and a non-price rule inside a single rule set. The count of four is a statement about screens rather than about rules. It says that clearing one whole rule set built around price almost never coincides with clearing a whole rule set that ignores price.
The hybrid screen is the neatest illustration, because it is the smallest. Quality at Reasonable Price passed five companies. Four of the five appear elsewhere in the library: Fortress Biotech, Inc. (FBIO) and Zevra Therapeutics, Inc. (ZVRA) also clear a price led screen, and Elastic N.V. (ESTC) and Western Digital Corp (WDC) also clear Buffett Quality. Only Elutia Inc. (ELUT) is unique to it. A screen built to hold both ideas at once ends up borrowing from both sides, which is what you would expect and is rarely demonstrated.
One month, or a structural feature?
A single run proves nothing on its own, so the same arithmetic runs across the stored history.
All eight screens have a stored run in each of the 28 consecutive months from May 2024 through August 2026. In that panel the share of each month's distinct passing companies appearing on two or more screens has a median of 8.2%, a minimum of 5.8% and a maximum of 11.8%. The highest number of screens any single company passed simultaneously was four, reached in 11 of the 28 months, and never five. The average month filled 299 places with 274 distinct companies.
Widening to everything on file makes the same point over a longer horizon. Across all 780 stored monthly runs, spanning 135 run dates from May 2015 to August 2026, 1,672 distinct companies have passed at least one screen at least once. Of those, 1,104, or 66.0%, have only ever appeared on a single screen in the entire recorded history. Nine companies have turned up on five different screens at some point over the eleven years, and three on six, but those are lifetime tallies rather than simultaneous ones. Simultaneous agreement is rarer still.
Across 780 stored runs, five screens have passed the same company in the same month on only 13 occasions, spread over 12 separate months and four companies: Dillard's, Inc. (DDS) in April, May and June 2022, Louisiana-Pacific Corp (LPX) in June, July and August 2022, Warrior Met Coal, Inc. (HCC) in September, October and November 2022, and Cal-Maine Foods Inc (CALM) in May, June, July and August 2023. Every one of those months fell in a stretch when seven of the eight screens had a stored run. Six screens have never agreed on one company at all. Three of those four companies reached five screens during 2022 and the fourth during 2023, with no instance since, so even the peak agreement in this dataset sits in one past stretch rather than being a recurring feature.
One qualification belongs with the historical figures. The eight stored histories begin on eight different dates falling in five calendar years, from May 2015 to May 2024, which is the shape of a history assembled from point in time filing data rather than published month by month as it happened. Treat it as a reconstruction. It is also why the 28 month panel is quoted separately: that window is the only stretch where all eight screens are present in every month, so it is the only clean comparison.
Reading a value stock screener result you did not compute
If eight definitions of value produce eight nearly disjoint lists, then the question worth asking of any value stock screener is not how many companies it returned. It is whether you can see why each one is there.
That comes down to four things, and they can be checked in order.
The rule in the form the engine evaluates it. A screen described as looking for "attractive valuations" is not a rule. A screen printing earnings_yield > 0.1 is. GuruScreens prints both on every screen page, the description in words and the machine readable form underneath, so a disagreement between the two becomes visible rather than staying hidden. All eight rule sets read this way without an account.
The company's own figure beside the threshold. Knowing a company failed Buffett Quality is far less useful than knowing it failed on return on equity specifically, and by how much. The per stock criterion audit, which lists each rule with its threshold and the company's actual value from the filing, is part of Pro at $99 a year. The free view stops short of that per-rule detail, and the boundary is stated here rather than left to be discovered.
The prior runs, kept as they stood. A screener built as a live query can only tell you what its rules return today. Asking what the same screen returned in March means rerunning today's rules on today's restated data, which is a different question. GuruScreens keeps 780 monthly runs across the eight screens, and the date selector on a screen page lists every one of that screen's own runs with its pass count. The membership of a past run is part of Pro.
The backtest, traced to those stored runs. Because the runs are stored, a monthly rebalanced backtest can be built from specific historical lists rather than from a rerun of current rules. Each screen's backtest page shows headline statistics without an account, and the full charts, period returns and per ticker breakdown are part of Pro. Every one of those figures is a hypothetical simulation result rather than a record of money invested.
For a wider comparison of the guru screening tools against each other, including where this library is deliberately narrower than the alternatives, the side by side look at guru screeners covers the trade off. If your idea does not map onto a named strategy at all, the MarketXLS stock screener takes a plain language description and assembles the filter set for you, which is a different job from running one fixed rule set the same way every month.
Choosing which definition of value to run
The overlap result turns the usual question inside out. Rather than asking which value stock screener is best, ask which of these questions you actually want answered, because the eight rule sets answer different ones.
If the question is whether a company is trading below what its balance sheet alone would fetch, the asset based test is the one that speaks to it, and it will hand you a small, unglamorous list. If the question is whether a company earns a lot relative to its price today, an earnings yield floor is the direct test, and it will surface companies whose current earnings may or may not persist. If the question is whether a business has been consistently profitable, conservatively financed and growing, none of the price led screens tests that, and the three screens carrying no valuation rule do. If the question is both at once, only the hybrid screen tries, and this month it found five companies out of 3,787.
What the data argues against is running several value screens and treating the combined output as one shortlist of undervalued companies. On 1 August 2026 that combined output was 238 names selected on incompatible grounds, and only four of them cleared both a price led rule set and a rule set that ignores price. A shortlist assembled that way inherits the assumptions of whichever screen contributed each name, and those assumptions do not survive being averaged.
Prefer to build this in Excel?
Some readers would rather own the calculation than read someone else's, which is a legitimate preference and a genuinely different workflow. The MarketXLS walkthrough of a small cap value screener built in Excel shows you how to assemble the valuation filters yourself with live data, and the net current asset value screener guide does the same for the strictest of the asset based tests.
The trade off runs both ways. Building it yourself gives you complete control of every threshold and no dependence on a vendor's interpretation, which matters more than usual once you have seen how far eight interpretations diverge. It also makes you responsible for storing each month's output, which is the part that is hardest to keep up by hand and the part that makes an overlap study like this one possible at all.
Value stock screener FAQ
What is a value stock screener?
A value stock screener applies a fixed set of numeric rules to a universe of companies and returns the ones that clear every rule. The word value describes the intent behind the rules, not the rules themselves, which is why two value screeners can return almost entirely different companies from the same universe on the same day. The useful question is always which specific tests the screener runs and where its thresholds sit.
Why do two value stock screeners return completely different stocks?
Because they encode different definitions of value. Across eight value screens run on the same 3,787 US-listed companies on 1 August 2026, 262 places were filled by 238 distinct companies, and 217 of those appeared on exactly one screen. Three screens in that library contain no valuation rule at all and test profitability, leverage and payment history instead, so their output overlaps a cheapness screen only by coincidence.
Should a value screen include a price to earnings limit?
That depends on what the screen is for, and the honest answer is that many well known value rule sets do not include one. Of the thirty rules across these eight screens, eight compare a price to a fundamental and twenty two do not. A screen without a price test can identify a strong business and cannot tell you whether it is cheap. A screen with only a price test can identify a low multiple and cannot tell you whether the earnings behind it persist.
How many stocks should a value stock screener return?
There is no correct number, and the range in this library is instructive: from 3 companies to 102 out of the same 3,787, depending on the rule set. A very short list usually means one binding rule is doing nearly all the work, which is worth identifying before you conclude the market is expensive. A long list usually means the rules are individually easy to clear. Neither is a defect on its own, but both change how the output should be read.
Can a value stock screener tell me which stocks are undervalued?
No. A screen reports which companies satisfied a set of arithmetic tests on a given date using figures drawn from filings. Whether a company is undervalued depends on what its business will earn in future, which no screening rule evaluates. Every company named in this article appears solely to illustrate how the rules behaved, and none is a recommendation.
Is a free value stock screener good enough?
For understanding a strategy and seeing how selective it is, often yes. On GuruScreens the eight rule sets, their exact thresholds, the total pass count per screen, the top five passing companies and the full list of stored runs with each run's count are open without payment. The complete passing lists, the per stock audit of each rule against the company's own figure and the full backtest detail are the paid part at $99 a year. The plan comparison sets out the boundary line by line.
The bottom line
Value stock screener comparisons usually turn on interface and filter counts, which assumes the underlying question is settled and only the execution differs. It is not settled. Eight rule sets, all of them defensibly called value screening, applied to identical data on the same day, filled 262 places with 238 companies and agreed on almost nothing. Three of the eight never looked at the share price at all, and only four companies cleared both a price led rule set and a rule set that ignores price.
The practical conclusion is small and firm. Decide which question you want answered before you pick the tool, then read the rules in the exact form the engine evaluates them, and treat the strategy name above them as a label rather than a specification.
Start with the eight guru screens, where every threshold, every total pass count and the full list of stored runs are readable at no cost, and move to Pro at $99 a year when you want the full passing lists, the per criterion audit against each company's own figures, adjustable thresholds and the complete backtest.
Disclosure: GuruScreens is an independent product of MarketXLS Limited, which also operates MarketXLS and the MarketXLS stock screener linked above, so those references are to a commonly owned product. MarketXLS Limited is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, and nothing in this article is regulated financial advice. GuruScreens is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Warren Buffett, Benjamin Graham's estate, Joel Greenblatt, John Neff, Tobias Carlisle, or any firm associated with them. All trademarks belong to their owners. Each screen is a GuruScreens interpretation of a publicly described investing method, not a rule set written by the investor whose name it carries. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation, or a forecast. Any company named above illustrates how the screening engine behaved on a specific date and is not a view on that company. All backtest and performance figures on this product, including any shown in the image above, are hypothetical results produced by simulation, they are not the results of money actually invested, and past screen performance does not indicate future results. Screen figures come from the GuruScreens runs effective 1 August 2026 and from the stored monthly run history, both of which change every month, and the overlap arithmetic uses Pro tier passing lists and run history rather than free tier data. Company legal names were checked against the SEC company ticker file on 19 August 2026. Product entitlements were checked on 19 August 2026 and can change.