Methodology

Every value in StockMemo is one of two things. A fact comes from a company disclosure or a market data provider and carries a period, a source and a link to the original document. Judgment is anything you wrote: the thesis, the conviction, the valuation assumptions, the interpretation of a result.

The two never merge. A scorecard row shows your expectation beside a reported figure and labels which is which. Your assumptions are always presented as your assumptions.

For U.S. filers, SEC EDGAR is the primary source: company profiles, the filing index, and XBRL company facts covering revenue, gross profit, operating income, net income, diluted EPS, operating cash flow, capital expenditure and R&D expense.

Some values are computed from those facts rather than reported directly — gross margin, operating margin, free cash flow and year-over-year revenue growth. These are labelled computed and point at the filing they were derived from.

Prices are optional. There is no free, terms-clean, rate-stable quote feed, so StockMemo treats quotes as a plug-in provider. Without one configured the product works end to end and simply reports that prices are not connected — it never displays an invented price.

Figures that do not appear in XBRL — segment revenue, subscriber counts, deliveries — can be recorded by hand. They are stored with an explicit “entered by you” source so a hand-entered number is never mistaken for a filed one.

Thesis intact, Watching, Review required and Thesis closed are workflow states on your own memo. They describe the state of your argument, not the quality of the company or the attractiveness of the stock.

On the scorecard, PASS means a reported figure satisfied the expectation you wrote. WATCH means it did not, or sits within ten percent of your own threshold. TRIGGERED means an invalidation condition you defined was met. UNKNOWN means there is no reported figure yet.

None of these combine into a company score, and none of them are a recommendation. A triggered rule produces one instruction: review your thesis.

Changing a thesis, conviction, time horizon, market-expectation note or valuation assumption writes a new version row. Previous versions are never updated or deleted, and each change records what moved, what it moved from, what it moved to, and the reason you gave.

A review that changes your conviction opens a new version automatically, so the ledger and the memo can never disagree.

Your memos live in StockMemo’s own database, not in a third party. If EDGAR is unreachable or a price provider fails, the memo still opens, the thesis still reads and the ledger is still complete — the affected panels say what is missing and why.

AI is available only as an assistant that summarises a filing, explains a change or compares a filing against what you already wrote. It must cite the source material it used, it does not invent facts, and it never issues a buy, sell or hold. Those actions are disabled unless a model provider is explicitly configured for the deployment.