Independence

As an independent research provider, MarketGrader's single goal is to provide investors with a tool to help them make educated investment decisions. MarketGrader does not have any ties to the brokerage or investment banking businesses, therefore avoiding any potential conflicts of interest with our research. And more importantly, since MarketGrader's indicators, grades, ratings, etc. are all computer-operated, there is no human opinion involved in generating our company reports.

The system's independence also translates into a breakdown of our ratings that is quite different from that of most research providers. Our system does not pre-rank companies into a given rating and does not allocate given percentages into pre-determined BUY, HOLD or SELL ratings. Historically this has translated into a much larger number of sells than buys by about a 3-to-1 ratio. The charts nearby illustrate the current breakdown of our grades and ratings.

Such disparity between positive and negative ratings is mostly owed to the system's strict methodology, which seeks to reward those companies with the strongest financials.

Transparency

A cornerstone of MarketGrader's research, transparency is a quality we strive for when designing how our stock reports are presented to clients. Second only to the research methodology itself, usability and presentation are very important aspects of our system. Our goal is to make the research as transparent as possible so our clients understand how the analysis works, where the grades come from and why every company receives the rating it does. Yet where transparency is most important is in the accurate depiction of research performance.

Beginning at the individual indicator level, our system attempts to explain as clearly as possible how every MarketGrader indicator is graded and what specific numbers are used in each grading equation. At the rating level the system allows you to see at any time where every company ranks in its sub-industry, its economic sector and our entire coverage universe. And more importantly it allows you to see what our daily rating has been in the last 18 months and how the stock price has behaved in that time period. Making our research transparent, clear and relevant is always a work in progress as evidenced by constant enhancements to our web site and our PDF research reports. We also welcome client feedback about ways our presentation can be improved.