What it is
Breakaway scores every US stock that trades enough shares each day. Each one gets 13 momentum traits plus a Quality Score. The Quality Score adds trend, size, profit, run-up, news, insider trades, government trades and persistence. Run-up is the gain the stock has already made. Persistence is how long the score has held up. The list refreshes every 15 seconds and puts the best setups first. The Quality Score is the badge on every card and the number the grid is ranked by. The trait count on its own only says how many of the 13 traits are firing today. That is accurate and short-sighted at the same time. A broken stock bouncing inside a two-year decline can light eight traits in a good week. The Quality Score exists to fix that.
How it is built
The Quality Score starts from the technical score, which is the trait count, and adds trend quality, from minus three to plus four. Points come from being above the 200-day, from a rising 200-day, from being near the 52-week high and from being at a multi-year high. Points are taken away for being down over one year and over two years. Size adds two points for a mega cap at $200 billion and one for a large cap at $10 billion. It takes one point away for a micro cap under $300 million. Run-up is the gain already delivered. It adds two points for a stock up 100 percent or more over the last year, or up 60 percent over the last six months. It adds one point for a stock up 30 percent over six months. A stock listed for less than six months has no six-month return, so it earns nothing there. Profit adds a point for a company that made money over its last fiscal year. A loss takes one away. Both come straight from the SEC filing. A move in a business that earns money has a better record of lasting.
Then come the outside signals, worth up to three points each way. They are news read together with the company's 8-K filings, insider trades, and government trades. Insider trades are read against the stock's own 52-week range. A sale within a few percent of the 52-week low counts against the stock much harder than routine selling near a high. A buy near the low counts for more. When an officer or director sells into the 52-week low, this part of the score is held at minus one or worse. The ticker page says so in plain words, because a chosen sale at the low means the insider has lost faith. An earnings beat or miss, and a change in the company's own forecast, are scaled by how the stock reacted to the report. A lasting event such as an earnings report, a contract, an approval or a share offering that dilutes owners keeps counting for twenty days. An analyst note counts for five.
Last comes persistence, worth up to two points. It is the one part that describes weeks instead of today. It takes the median, or middle value, of the stock's last twenty recorded scores. A median of 12 or more earns two points and 9 or more earns one. Under ten days on record it pays nothing, and it never goes negative.
Put it together and NVDA at a new high, with an earnings beat and insider buying, can reach a Quality Score around twenty. A micro cap on a rumor with the same seven chips lit stays in single digits. The ticker page puts a plain word on the total. Exceptional is 18 and up, Strong is 14, Above average is 10, Average is 5, Weak is 0, and Poor is below zero.
How ties are broken
Stocks are ordered by the Quality Score first. When two of them tie, the higher trait count goes first. Then comes the higher relative strength ranking, then the larger market cap, then the symbol in alphabetical order. The order stays steady from one scan to the next instead of shuffling between refreshes.
Why it matters
Big companies have earnings, analyst coverage, index money and institutional ownership. A breakout in one of those follows through far more often than the same chart on a small, lightly traded stock. Ranking by quality puts the strongest of those at the top without hiding the small companies. They still score, they still appear in every list, and they still rank when their trend and signals earn it. This is a way of ordering a list. It is not a recommendation to buy anything on it.