GARP Stock Screener

Growth at a reasonable price — profitable, growing companies you're trying not to overpay for. Here's exactly how st-ox's Smart Screen looks for them, across 12 markets.

What is GARP investing?

GARP — Growth At a Reasonable Price — is the middle ground between pure growth and pure value investing, most associated with Peter Lynch. Growth investors will pay up for fast expansion; value investors hunt for cheap stocks. GARP asks for both at once: real, durable growth and a sensible valuation. The classic shorthand is the PEG ratio — the price/earnings multiple divided by the growth rate — but a good GARP screen goes further than PEG alone.

How the screen works

Smart Screen isn't a single filter — it's a pipeline that turns a whole market into a ranked shortlist:

1. You pick one of 12 markets to screen.
2. The screen applies the hard gates — a company must pass every one to survive.
3. It keeps only uptrends — price above its 200-day moving average.
4. It scores every survivor 0–100 on four factors.
5. It caps each sector at four names and shows the top 25.

The hard gates

These are pass/fail. The Quality Compounder preset requires all of them:

Valuation is deliberately not a gate — it only feeds the score. A stock that is strong on quality, growth and momentum can look expensive and still rank high, so check the PEG and price-to-free-cash-flow before assuming the price is sane.

The four factors

Whatever survives the gates is scored 0–100. Each factor is measured on ratios, so the same scoring works in any currency or market:

The metric choices that matter

Two screens with the same idea can give very different results depending on which numbers they trust. The Quality Compounder makes deliberate choices:

• ROIC over ROE. Return on equity can be inflated with debt; ROIC measures the return on all the capital in the business, so it's a cleaner quality signal.
• Net debt / EBITDA over debt / equity. A more honest read of leverage that credits companies sitting on net cash.
• PEG and price-to-free-cash-flow. Earnings can be massaged; free cash flow is harder to fake, so valuation is judged on both.

Not just GARP: four more styles

Quality Compounder is the core GARP screen, but the same engine runs four other presets:

• Emerging Growth — faster-growing small and mid caps with durable margins, with no free-cash-flow gate; positive free cash flow is rewarded in the score instead. The cap band is wide — roughly $300M to $20B on the US market — so the largest names it returns can already be large caps.
• Capital Preservation — defensive, low-volatility dividend payers, scored on quality, stability, a price that isn't stretched, and income rather than growth.
• Microcap Survivors — the penny/microcap end of the market, scored on survival first. Down at this size the usual cause of loss isn't picking the wrong story but dilution, so the screen leads with cash runway (how many quarters of cash a company has left at its current burn rate), demands a balance sheet that doesn't force a raise, and excludes OTC and pink-sheet listings outright.
• Magic Formula — Joel Greenblatt's two-number ranking: every company is ranked on return on capital and on earnings yield, and the lowest combined rank wins. No weights, no sector limit and, unlike the other presets, no uptrend filter — the formula deliberately buys good businesses the market has marked down.

Markets covered

You can run the screen on any of twelve exchanges: the US, London, Paris, Frankfurt (Xetra), Amsterdam, Milan, Switzerland, Stockholm, Copenhagen, Helsinki, Tokyo and Hong Kong. How stretched the overall market is worth watching too — see the Buffett Indicator for the US backdrop.

Frequently asked questions

For information and educational purposes only. Not investment advice, and not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Screen results are a starting point for your own research.