Reading a scorecard

What the number is

The Gladiator Score is a conviction rating: a single number from 0 to 100, published with every pick, scored the same way for every stock. It answers one question — how strongly does the evidence support this call? — and nothing else. It draws on fundamentals, valuation against the stock's own sector, the quality of price momentum, and balance-sheet risk. We don't publish precise weightings for those inputs, and you should be suspicious of any scoring system that pretends its weights are settled science.

The most important property of the score is not what goes into it. It's that the number is frozen at publication. Once a pick goes out, its score never changes — not when the stock runs, not when it falls over, not when hindsight makes us wish we'd said something different. A score you can revise after the outcome is known isn't a score. It's marketing with a delay.

The override, in the open

The score starts as a model output, but analysts can overrule it. When that happens, the override is published with the pick, along with the reasoning. This matters more than it might seem: a research house that quietly blends human judgement into a 'model' number is asking you to trust two things while pretending there's only one. We'd rather show you the seam.

What the number is not

The score is not a price target. A high score doesn't say how far a stock might move, only how strongly the evidence supported the call at publication. It is not a forecast of timing — an 80 can take two years to be proven right or three months to be proven wrong. It is not a probability in the statistical sense; nobody can honestly tell you a stock has 'a 74% chance' of anything. And it is emphatically not personal advice. The score knows nothing about your tax position, your mortgage, your risk tolerance, or the fact that you already own three miners.

How to actually use it

The score earns its keep in comparison. Direction — buy or avoid — is a coarse signal; conviction is the fine one. Two BUY calls with scores of 80 and 55 are not the same statement, and the gap between them is exactly the information most research never gives you. Read the score as the desk showing its hand: this is how much we believed, in writing, before we knew the outcome.

A sensible reading order for any pick page: the score first, to calibrate how much weight the desk itself is putting behind the idea. Then the bear case — always the bear case before the bull case, for reasons Lesson II goes into. Then the bull case, then the pick's place in the published record.

The two classic mistakes

The first mistake is treating a high score as certainty. High-conviction calls fail. They should fail less often than low-conviction ones — and our track record page exists precisely so you can check whether they do — but an 85 that never loses would be evidence of a rigged scoreboard, not a brilliant one.

The second mistake is treating the score as a sizing instruction. How much capital an idea deserves depends on your circumstances, your portfolio, and your appetite for being wrong — decisions that belong to you and, if you have one, your adviser. The score is a disciplined input to that decision. It is never the decision itself.

Read this way, a scorecard becomes something rare in financial publishing: a falsifiable statement. We wrote down how much we believed, we froze it, and we let the outcome judge us in public. Your job as a reader is simpler than it looks — hold us to it.