How to Actually Use the arvy Screening

«Know what you own, and know why you own it.»

Peter Lynch, Investor

A confession first.

The most valuable thing our screening has ever done for us is not the ideas it surfaced. It is the love stories it ended.

Every investor carries a few positions they adore — businesses they know inside out, theses they have defended at dinner tables, names that have become part of their identity. And every investor, eventually, holds one of these a year or two longer than the market was willing to honour it. The screening exists so that this happens to us as rarely as possible. It is a sober, unemotional second opinion that sits next to every conviction we have — 811 stocks and over 300 ETFs, each scored week after week on the two questions that decide everything: is this a great business, and does Mr. Market agree?

I will show you exactly what I mean — including the two seven-year holdings the screening forced us to sell, and what has happened to them since.

If you have read «The Screening (Stocks & ETFs)», you know what the tool is and how to get in. This piece is the other half: how to actually use it. The workflows we run at arvy, screen by screen — and the mindset that makes the tool worth ten times its price.

Let's go.

Start With the Stocks: 811 Names, Three Lenses

The heart of the screening is the stock universe: 811 of the world's finest businesses, each scored on fundamentals (Good Story), on technical price action (Good Chart), and on the Composite — 50% each. This is where every session starts.

The first thing to understand is that you are not locked into one view. You can sort and filter by all three scores independently, and each lens answers a different question:

Composite — the full arvy view. Great business, confirmed by the tape. This is where our own hunting happens, and where the elite compounders above 90 live.

Good Chart only — pure trend strength. Sort by this if you want to see what is moving, where relative strength is building, what institutions are accumulating right now — regardless of whether the fundamentals have caught up yet. The tape leads the news.

Good Story only — pure fundamental quality. Sort by this and you get the world's best business models, including the ones the market currently hates. Names with exceptional economics trading in downtrends — misunderstood, out of favour, or simply early.

Chart 1: The stock screening — 811 quality compounders, each scored on Good Story, Good Chart, and Composite

When Story and Chart Disagree: The Veeva Case

The most instructive names in the whole database are the ones where the two lenses violently disagree. Take Veeva Systems.

Veeva's fundamentals are, frankly, bonkers: a near-monopoly platform for the life-sciences industry, exceptional margins, robust free cash flow, a fortress balance sheet. On Good Story, it scores among the very best in the entire universe — best in class. But Veeva is software, and as we laid out in «Software's Good Story – and Why It's Not Good Enough», the entire sector is trapped in a primary downtrend the fundamentals cannot bounce their way out of. So Veeva's Good Chart score is dismal — and the Composite lands somewhere that would never make our buy list.

At arvy, we do not buy against the trend. That is a hard rule: a great story without market confirmation is a thesis, not a position. But if you are a different kind of investor — a patient contrarian hunting for turnaround setups — this exact divergence is your screen. Sort by Good Story, filter for weak Good Chart, and the database hands you a ranked list of the highest-quality businesses the market is currently refusing to honour. If software ever bases and turns, a name like Veeva is arguably one of the biggest bottom-fishing, buy-the-dip turnaround opportunities on the board — in terms of price, at least. The screening will not make that bet for you. But it will show you exactly where it lives, and it will tell you the moment the chart starts to confirm.

Chart 2: Veeva Systems — a near-perfect Good Story trapped in a broken Good Chart. Best-in-class fundamentals, a sector in a downtrend

The Love Story We Ended: Wolters Kluwer & RELX

Now the confession from the opening, paid in full — because the divergence between Story and Chart is not only where opportunities hide. It is where sell decisions live. And the hardest sell decisions of our ten years were Wolters Kluwer and RELX.

For seven years, these were among the very best businesses we owned — and I would argue among the best on earth. Dominant professional-information franchises with subscription revenues, deep moats woven into the daily workflows of lawyers, doctors, accountants and scientists, exceptional returns on capital, decades of steady compounding behind them. Dividend aristocrats that had delivered, reliably, for as long as most investors can remember. The kind of names you buy intending never to sell.

We started selling in July and August of 2025. And I will be honest with you: the discussions inside the team were long, and I was the one pushing back hardest. How do you sell a dividend aristocrat that has delivered over such a long period? Such a beautiful business model. Such a compounder. The Good Story scores agreed with me — both names sat above 90 on fundamentals, elite territory, ahead of almost everything else in the universe.

But the tape did not agree, and we honour the tape. As the trend deteriorated through the summer, we cut the positions in half. Then down to a minor one. And in October 2025, at the absolute weekly break, we sold out completely — after weak bounces, no sign of relief, and, most telling of all, no solid positive reaction even to genuinely good news: stellar earnings that clearly demonstrated no operational issue, a big share-buyback announcement, dividend increases. When a stock cannot rally on news like that, Mr. Market is telling you the problem is not in the numbers.

What was he pricing instead? A fear no income statement showed and no annual report admitted: that AI would do to curated professional information what it is doing to the rest of the software economy — the dynamic we chronicled in «AI Eats Software». In the screening, the divergence was impossible to ignore: Good Chart scores collapsing toward 30 while the Story scores stayed above 90. Two businesses we loved, fundamentally intact, being systematically distributed.

Our full exit came still before the final flush. After the sale, another roughly –40% and a significant trend break. From their highs, both names now trade roughly 70% lower — and the fundamentals still have not materially changed. The price has.

Of course we will endure losses. We will miss things, and some of our theses will simply be wrong — that is the business. But we will not sit in a –70% position and hope for a turnaround. Selling roughly 30% off the highs instead of riding to minus 70 is not clairvoyance; it is a tripwire, honoured. That single pair of decisions has paid for a lifetime of subscriptions — and it is exactly the kind of decision the tool exists to force.

Chart 3: Wolters Kluwer, weekly, 2012–2026 — seven years of compounding, the 2025 trend deterioration, our staged exit into the October weekly break, and the roughly –40% flush that followed

Chart 4: The same story inside the screening — a Good Story above 90, a Good Chart below 30. Unbelievable fundamentals, a broken trend

Build Watchlists — and Let Them Work For You

Once a name catches your eye, park it. The screening lets you build your own watchlists — your turnaround candidates, your wish-list compounders waiting for a better price, the peers of everything you own. Instead of re-running the same mental checklist every weekend, your shortlist sits in one place with live scores attached, and you see immediately when a story starts to be confirmed — or when one of your favourites starts to degrade.

Chart 5: Watchlists — build your own shortlists inside the screening, with live scores attached

From Map to Name: Story × Chart and the Sector Drill-Down

The Story × Chart map turns the whole universe into a single picture. Every subsector plotted on two axes — fundamentals across, technicals up — with the top-right Leaders quadrant showing where story and tape align, and the bottom-left showing where value traps and early-but-wrong ideas cluster. One glance and you know where in the market you are allowed to hunt.

Chart 6: The Story × Chart map — every subsector on two axes. Top-right is where story and tape agree; bottom-left is where love stories go to die

From there, click into any sector and the screening opens it up: subsector rankings, the constituents, and how each name scores against its direct peers. This is the fastest idea-generation loop in the tool — see which sector is leading, drill in, and find the two or three names carrying it. It is equally the fastest reality check: pull up the peers of any stock you own and see, in one table, who in the neighbourhood is doing better, and on which lens.

Chart 7: Drilling into a sector — subsector rankings and peer comparison. Who is carrying the sector, and who is being carried

The Sector Ranking: Where Three of Four Stocks Get Their Fate

Well over half of a stock's performance is driven by its sector — roughly three out of four stocks simply move with their neighbourhood. Fighting a weak sector is a low-probability sport, however good the individual business. So before any single name, we look at the sector board.

All eleven sectors are ranked on two tiers. The Composite tier blends fundamentals and technicals — current, confirmed quality. The Good Chart tier is pure price action, and this is the forward-looking one: price leads fundamentals by months, so a sector climbing the Chart ranking while still mediocre on Composite is often the earliest visible sign of a rotation. When both tiers agree at the top, conviction is highest. When Chart deteriorates while Composite still looks fine, smart money is leaving before the spreadsheets catch up.

One honest caveat, and it matters for reading the board correctly: this is a quality screening. The universe is built from businesses with high returns on capital, strong margins, and low leverage. Banks, utilities, and deeply cyclical industries structurally struggle to score highly on Good Story — not because the screening is broken, but because they rarely meet the bar we set for a compounder. So do not read a low rank for such a sector as a simple «avoid» in all circumstances; read the board as it is built. Connecting the dots — and developing a feel for how the screening breathes — is the skill.

Chart 8: The sector heatmap — all eleven sectors ranked over time on Composite and on pure Good Chart. Green leads, red lags, and the story of the whole market is in the colours

The month-over-month view distils the same board into pure momentum: who climbed, who slipped, and how fast. Sustained climbing is leadership forming; a sudden multi-rank jump is the market telling you something changed.

Chart 9: Month-over-month sector momentum — who is climbing the ranking, who is rolling over

A word on cadence, because it matters for how you use these boards: the screening is refreshed at minimum monthly. And when volatility picks up, we refresh more often — as we did just recently during the Tech and Semi rout — because fast markets are exactly when the Chart lens earns its keep. In calm regimes, the monthly rhythm is the signal; in stormy ones, the extra snapshots are.

Case Study: When Energy Suddenly Moved — 2022

This is not theoretical. Rewind to 2022. Technology — the untouchable leader of an entire decade — rolls over. And in the sector board, Energy, the most hated corner of the market, starts climbing the ranking hard, month after month. No opinion required, no macro call, no narrative: the ranking simply moved, and kept moving.

Chart 10: 2022 in the sector ranking — Energy surging up the board as Technology rolls over. The rotation, visible in real time

Overlay the two sectors on the tape and you see what the ranking was measuring: one of the most violent leadership rotations in a decade, visible in the screening while most of the market was still anchored to the old regime.

Chart 11: The same rotation on the tape — Energy against Technology through 2022. What the ranking measured, the market delivered

Four years later, the same machinery flagged the same sector again — the fifteen-year breakout and the forward-looking Chart ranking that put Energy at number one, which became «The Old Economy (Energy & Gold) Strikes Back». The workflow in that piece is exactly the workflow described here: sector board first, forward-looking tier second, then drill down to the names.

Monthly Movers: What Changed This Month

Scores are snapshots; changes are signals. The Monthly Movers view ranks the biggest score changes across the whole stock universe — and, again, you can slice it by Composite, by Story, or by Chart. A stock whose Chart score is improving fast is being accumulated. A stock whose Story score is quietly eroding is deteriorating fundamentally before the headline numbers admit it. This is the screen for catching inflections early — in both directions.

Chart 12: Monthly Movers — the biggest score changes across the stock universe, sliced by Composite, Story, or Chart

The Live Portfolio: What We Actually Did About It

Next to the engine sits the output: the complete, live arvy portfolio. Exactly what we own, and how we adjust as trends evolve. The screening shows the opportunity set; the portfolio shows what we did about it — the roughly 30 holdings we run for our clients and in which we invest alongside them. Use it as a reference point, not a copy machine: seeing which names we hold, and how they score, teaches you more about how the framework translates into a real portfolio than any abstract description could.

Chart 13: The live arvy portfolio — exactly what we own, sitting next to the engine that generates it

No Black Box: The Manual Inside the Tool

Every number in the screening is explained. The «How it works» section walks through exactly what feeds every Good Story score — moat, ROIC, margins, organic growth, FCF generation and valuation, leverage, structural tailwinds — and every Good Chart score: price structure, accumulation and distribution, relative strength, new highs, linearity, sector strength. Plus the full sector methodology, the two-tier logic, and the decision framework for reading alignments and divergences. Ten minutes in there and you will understand every score you see. We built the tool to be interrogated, not believed.

Chart 14: The manual — every input behind every Good Story and Good Chart score, documented inside the tool

The ETF Dimension: What Is Moving, Across Everything

Toggle from Stocks to ETFs and the whole engine re-points at a second universe: over 300 funds across asset classes, scored on the same dual lens. This is where you see what is moving in the broadest sense — sectors, themes, regions, factors — and where a conviction can be expressed through the basket instead of the single name.

Chart 15: The ETF universe — 300+ funds across asset classes, scored on the same Good Story & Good Chart framework

The ETF Monthly Movers are, quietly, one of the most valuable screens in the entire tool. What is improving fastest is what the market is starting to chase — where momentum is building, where an early opportunity may be forming, what is en vogue before it is in the headlines.

Two live examples, both of which became research pieces — and both of which come with receipts. When we published «Fortinet vs Palo Alto: The Cybersecurity Duopoly That AI Cannot Eat», cybersecurity funds held five of the top eight spots on the three-month momentum board — capital rotating measurably, mechanically, week after week into the one software subsector where AI strengthens the story, while the headlines were still debating whether AI would kill it. Fortinet ranked as the top software name in the entire 811-stock universe at a Composite of 95.1, with Palo Alto directly behind at 94.4 — after runs of roughly 110% and 90% year-to-date. The screening did not predict the IBM profit warning that confirmed the thesis. It simply measured the accumulation, months ahead of the narrative.

Energy told the same story from the other direction: by the time the Old Economy trilogy went out, the sector ranked first of eleven on the pure forward-looking Chart tier — having sat eighth at the start of the year — with energy funds climbing the ETF movers board in parallel. The pattern is the same each time: the movers board flags the rotation, the sector board confirms it, the stock screen finds the names — and the deep dive follows. When you see a theme climbing this board, you are watching the raw material of our research pipeline.

Chart 16: ETF Monthly Movers — Cyber Security and Energy climbing the board before the headlines caught up

Your First 15 Minutes

Everything above is the map. Here is the route we would walk on your very first login — fifteen minutes, six steps:

1 · Open the Sector Heatmap. Read the colours. Which sectors have been green on Composite for months? That is your hunting ground.

2 · Check the forward-looking tier. Now the pure Good Chart ranking. Is anything climbing there that is still mediocre on Composite? Note it — that is tomorrow's rotation, possibly.

3 · Drill into the leader. Open the Story × Chart map, click the strongest subsector in the top-right quadrant, and look at its constituents.

4 · Sort by Composite. The two or three names at the top of a leading subsector are, mechanically, among the best story-plus-tape setups in the entire market right now.

5 · Star your shortlist. Add them to a watchlist. Do nothing else yet — let the scores keep confirming for a snapshot or two.

6 · Now the uncomfortable part. Type in your own holdings, one by one. Look at each Chart score, each peer table, each score history. This step is where the tool stops being entertainment and starts being discipline.

The Real Use: Challenge Yourself

After ten years of running this discipline at arvy, let me tell you where the screening truly earns its keep: it is the tool that argues with you.

Run your own portfolio through it. Honestly. Screen the peers of every position and see who is doing better — and ask why. Find the holdings that are fighting their trend, or whose fundamentals are quietly deteriorating while your thesis stays frozen in the year you bought them. The question the screening forces on you, position by position, is the only one that matters: is my idea good and is Mr. Market also saying yes — or does it still need time, and am I honest enough to admit which?

And the framework gives you a hard tripwire, not a vague feeling: below 60, a name is below standard or degrading — avoid, or exit. That single rule is what turned our Wolters Kluwer and RELX heartbreak into a 40-point saving. Markets are never wrong; opinions often are. The screening gives you a touch and a feel for the whole market — but above all it is a sober reality check against your own portfolio, so you are never again stuck in a love story the market stopped honouring long ago. That discipline, applied for a decade, is worth more than any single stock pick will ever be.

Reader Q&A

«Is this a US-only universe?»

No — and that is one of its rarest features. The universe holds the best businesses on earth, globally: the US, Europe and a strong Swiss contingent, Japan, Latin America and beyond. Quality screening with genuine global and Swiss coverage is almost impossible to find elsewhere — and we keep adding names over time as businesses earn their way in.

«Can I see more than the current score?»

Yes. Every name carries its full score history — Composite, Story and Chart over time — plus its fundamentals measured against the subsector average, peer tables, and the chart read. You are not looking at a number; you are looking at a trajectory.

«How does access work day to day?»

No password to remember. Your access link is valid for one month; when it expires, you enter your subscription email at screening.arvy.ch, verify, and a fresh one-month link lands in your inbox — for as long as you are a paid member.

«Can I simply copy the live portfolio?»

You can see exactly what we own — but that is the least valuable way to use it. Our positions are sized for our mandate, our risk framework, and our time horizons, none of which are yours. The portfolio is there to show how the framework translates into real decisions. Learn the discipline; do not photocopy the output. And as always: the screening is a research tool, not investment advice.

Included in Your Subscription

All of this — the 811-stock universe, the 300+ ETFs, the sector boards, the Story × Chart map, the Monthly Movers, the watchlists, the manual, and the live arvy portfolio — is included in your paid subscription, alongside every deep dive and every piece of research we publish. Not as an add-on. As the same product: the research shows you our thinking; the screening lets you check it, challenge it, and run the discipline yourself.

Run the arithmetic. A standalone screening or charting platform alone costs $40–100+ per month elsewhere — and none of them comes with the research, the live portfolio, or a decade of applied methodology behind the scores. At $34 a month — or $340 a year, roughly 20% off — the screening alone out-prices the subscription before a single deep dive is counted. We have used this framework in-house at arvy for ten years; the WKL and RELX decision alone repaid it many times over. The research comes on top.

And you do not have to take my word for any of it: every subscription starts with a seven-day free trial — enough time to run your entire portfolio through the screening and let the tool argue with you once. Access is simple: go to screening.arvy.ch, enter the email address you subscribed with, and your link lands in your inbox. The full guide to the tool and access lives in «The Screening (Stocks & ETFs)».

Know what you own — and know why you own it. Now you have the tool for both halves.

— Thierry

Legal Notice: The screening is a research tool, not investment advice. At the time of publication of this article, the companies mentioned may or may not be portfolio holdings of arvy. Such securities may or may not be included in the portfolio at any point in the future. This document has been prepared solely for informational and marketing purposes and does not constitute an invitation, offer, or recommendation to acquire or sell any financial instruments or to engage in any other transactions. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results. arvy AG is authorised by FINMA as a manager of collective assets under CISA Art. 24.