Understanding our naming convention

With so many metrics and measures across stocks, ETFs and mutual funds, it is important to have a standard naming convention.

Convention for financial metrics for stocks

Companies financial statements come for different periods – quarterly, semi-annually and annually.

Metrics suffixed with (FY) correspond to fiscal year-end statements. Metrics suffixed with (Q) correspond to quarter-end statements.

Metrix suffixed with (TTM) corresponds to trailing 12-month numbers and is generally the sum of the last 4 reported quarters (except for ratios). For example, if you are looking at the EPS (TTM) of RELIANCE in May 2023, it will correspond to the sum of the EPS of the last 4 quarters (Jun 2022 to Mar 2023). In this case, it will be the same as EPS (FY). Refer to this article for more details on trailing 12-month calculations.

Do note that for ease of reference in stock screening and building signals, all financial statement items are properly categorized as per their reporting period.

Convention for price returns

Price returns for periods 1 year or less, are called Return and suffixed with time period. For example, returns in the last 6 months will be called Return (6M) while returns in the last 1 year will be called Return (1Y). Returns are absolute and not annualized.

Price returns for periods greater than 1 year are annualized and named as CAGR, suffixed with time period. For example, the price return in the last 3 years will be called CAGR (3Y).

You can read more about price return calculation here.

For other metrics derived from price returns (alpha, beta, sharpe), similar convention is used. For example, stock’s alpha and beta in the last 1 year will be called Alpha (1Y) and Beta (1Y).

Convention for growth in financial items

Growth in financial items are named as follows:

• For year-on-year growth, it is named as metric name + growth + (1Y). Example - EPS growth (1Y).
• For growth over periods more than 1 year, we use CAGR. Example - EPS CAGR (3Y)

Average and Median

• Average of a metric is named as follows – Average + metric name + time period. Example - Average ROCE (3Y) is average ROCE in the last 3 years.
• Median of a metric is named as follows – Median + metric name + time period. Example - Median P/E (3Y) is median P/E in the last 3 years.

Detailed metric description

Despite our effort to stick to a standard naming convention, it can still get a bit confusing for investors. Therefore, all the metrics available for screening (stocks, ETFs and MFs), signal (stocks), and column customization in tables (stocks, ETFs and MFs) have been properly categorized and subcategorized.

Further, for each metric, we show a detailed description of that metric to avoid any kind of confusion.