A comprehensive stock evaluation framework involves analyzing multiple fundamental factors including profitability, growth, financial strength, momentum, and intrinsic value (GF Value), while also examining warning signs, insider/guru trading patterns, analyst forecasts, and historical financial data to make informed investment decisions.
Deep Dive
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Deep Dive
How to Evaluate a Stock Before You Buy
Added:Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's Wednesday YouTube session. I'm so happy to see you all here.
My name is Margaret and today I will be going over how to evaluate a stock before you buy it.
I will be going over how to analyze all of the company's fundamentals, their past 30 years of financial data, what gurus and insiders have been doing with the stock, as well as much more.
Now, um please try out our free trial.
It's a 7-day free trial and we'll we're very sure that you'll love it. Um it's very exciting to test out.
As well as if you have any questions during this session, please feel free to put them in the chat and I'll answer them. If there's one that has more details, I can email you after the session to explain it further.
All right. Again, thank you all so much for being here. Let's jump in. So, today we're going to be looking at Visa.
So, to come up to the search bar, um to find it just going to go to this search bar right here and you can start typing in the name.
Or you can just enter the ticker.
And let's look at Visa. So, to start, with every stock that we have here on our platform, you can just hover over the name and get a nice description of what that company has been doing.
So, as we all know, they're the largest payment processor in the world. Um if you come below to here, you can see the price. And beneath this is the predictability rank. So, it's saying based on its past earnings and results, we're showing you how predictable this company is. So, it has a five out of five star rating, which is excellent.
Now, beneath that, we have these warning signs. So, let's take a look at these.
And just click on one of them and scroll down a little bit to see.
Here's where you can see that Visa has five good signs. So, these are all things that can help you feel more confident about your purchase. Um they're good factors, good pointers about the stock.
And then these medium warning signs are going to be things that sometimes are worth looking into a little bit further, but it's not something that always means it's a severe warning. For example, so it's saying there were five insider selling transactions.
But of course, insiders selling does not always um indicate something bad. They could be just trying to sell their shares because they get sh- many shares for working at that company and they could be just trying to make some money. There's lots of different reasons that people could be selling their shares.
Um so this is always something good to look at.
And usually with companies, there are sometimes severe warning signs. So, there aren't any here for Visa, which is uh good to see.
Now, if we come over here to this GF Score. This is the GuruFocus Score. It is a very great way to instantly know whether a stock is worth your time.
It is so valuable because it takes into account five really important things.
And so, those five things are profitability, as we see here, growth, financial strength, momentum, and GF value.
And so, I'll explain how we look at these factors.
But, as you can see here, Visa has a score of 96 out of 100, which is really excellent.
If you hover over that 96, you can now see uh just where the rankings are for what we consider sort of a baseline good GF score. So, you can see that 91 to 100 usually has the highest outperformance potential, whereas 81 to 90 usually means a good outperformance potential.
71 to 80 likely to have average performance, 51 to 70 is poor, and 0 to 50 um can sometimes mean there's not enough data to display a GF score, or it has the worst future performance potential. So, staying in that 90 to 100 range has done well for um when you look at our back-testing results, you can see that investing in stocks with a GF score of 90 or higher has always been really successful.
Um now, let's just take a further look into what actually makes up the GF score. So, I explained it was these five things.
As you can see, uh the profitability rank, it's a 10 out of 10. So, 10 is the best.
Growth is 10 out of 10. Financial strength is 7 out of 10, and momentum is five out of 10.
So, if you come down here, you can actually see what makes up each of those factors. So, let's just take a look at profitability rank.
It's a 10 out of 10.
And the reason it's a 10 out of 10 is because of all of these factors being so excellent. So, to start just with any term, you're going to want to hover over it. You can learn more about it or click on it, and that will take us to a whole page that explains why it's important, how you can use it, and how it's calculated.
So, let's look at gross margin.
So, their gross margin right now is 81.29.
And the very nice thing about this is that you can see how they compare to the rest of the companies in their industry.
And you can do that by just hovering over the green bar.
So, now we can see that their gross margin is actually ranked better than 86% of the other 388 companies in the credit services industry. So, you can see this red is where they are. Here's the rest of those companies.
Um and so, they're ranked better. So, this can be very nice to see for someone who is a beginner investor. You don't have to understand all of these terms to know how they actually stand um in their sector. So, you can hover over and quickly see where they're ranked, which is very nice. And then, with this versus history, that's not looking at the competitors anymore.
It's just looking at how they've been doing with this metric historically. So, again, looking at gross margin, we can see if we hover over the bar that it's going to show us their current gross margin is 81.29.
And then, it's going to show us what it's been over the last 10 years. So, the minimum it ever reached was 79. The highest it ever reached was 82. So, they're towards their highest right now. And so, it gives you a good idea for how they're doing historically, which is very nice to see.
And again, you can see it for all of these metrics. For example, their cash debt ratio um is a lot lower than it's ever been over the last 10 years cuz it's 0.58 and the lowest it ever reached was 0.5. So, this is a very helpful tool that you can use for every metric.
Okay.
Now, let's just scroll down a little bit. I want to point out that you can also add notes to uh the stock as you look and maybe want to come back. You can add in what you thought about it. That way you won't lose track of where um of what you thought about the stock.
Then this Piotroski F score. This is just a good health check on a company.
So, there are nine things that the Piotroski F score looks at. And as you can see here, they have a score of eight. So, eight out of nine. That's pretty high performing.
Now, if you scroll a little further, you can also see the company's revenue. So, we can see that they've um only been going up but their revenue, which is great to see.
Again, let me know if you have any questions at all. I'd love to answer them.
And just to let you know, with any of these metric tables that you're looking at, you can simply hover over these three dots and drag them around. If you wanted to see the Piotroski F score towards the top, just drag it up to the top.
Okay.
Now, the last part of the GF score that I'll explain is this GF value. So, we can see here that the GF value for Visa is 421.
So, they're currently trading [clears throat] at 354.
So, that's why we have this tag here that says modestly undervalued. Um the GF value looks at the intrinsic value or the book value of the stock. It's taking into account their 30-year financials and their past revenue as well and a lot of other metrics to come up with what we believe they are actually worth um based on their fundamentals. So, this is great to see that they that the GF value is higher than their actual price.
All right.
So, the next thing I'll show you um is that with this stock you can or with any stock, come up to this bell right here and you can now set alerts about the stock. So, you can choose to be notified if there's a new 52-week low, if new insiders or politicians buy the stock or sell it, and you can even get notified if the price just goes up by, you know, more than 5%. Just press add alert and save.
Now, the next thing I'll show you is this 30-year financials.
So, this is where you can see decades worth of income statements, balance sheets, growth focus ratios. So, we can see here we're looking at September 2011, September 2012, all the way up to March 2026.
Now, you can change it to be per share data instead of per dollar.
You can change the settings to show all rows or hide some of the charts.
And you can also search a metric in the field here.
And also, you can always download it to Excel.
Um that button will be towards the top.
If we just take a little look.
Right here. So, you can export it.
Um you can export it as a PDF.
You can also see all the 30-year data.
Or maybe you just want to look at the last 5 years. That will have it a little more spaced out.
Okay, and I'm going to scroll down all the way to the bottom to show you another hidden feature about this. So, if one of if all of these metrics still are not enough for you, you can come right over here to this add customize field to actually build your own expression. So, you can give it a name, and then you can say, "I want to see the cash to debt ratio plus the current ratio." Or just really any expression, you can build it. Just press save new indicator, it'll follow you as you go through any stock. There are always multiple options. You can have as many as you'd like, and it can be a really helpful way to view the stock.
Okay.
So, going back up to the toolbar here, let's see here. So, the next tab I'll show you is this valuation tab right here.
This is where we can see a little bit more details about the GF value. So, again, it's 421, and we're explaining just why we believe it is modestly undervalued. And And there are some charts here that are explaining some correlation analysis between the price and revenue, the price versus book value.
All of these other metrics, you can see the historical ratios as well.
Okay.
So, someone asked Philip asked when you make these changes, does it apply to only that stock or all?
If you're talking about the 30-year financial changes when you make those changes, it will it will apply to if you added a custom expression, it will be saved, and then when you look at, let's say, Apple, that expression will still be there.
When I press 30 years, it changes it for all years throughout the whole page to answer your question.
Okay.
Now, the next tab I'll show you is this forecast tab.
So, let's take a look at this.
This is different from the GF value.
This is Wall Street analysts and other analysts.
We're just including that on here for you to get an idea of what the average analyst is saying about this stock. So, out of all the analysts we analyzed, we looked at 39 of them, you can see that the average price the analyst thinks it will be is 401.
So, that's a lot higher than its current price.
So, we can see here that um that's good to see.
And then here you can see that some analysts think it'll be as low as 324.
Some think it'll be as high as 450, which then brings it to that average of 401.
Now, over here on the right, we can see the analyst ratings as to what they are saying you should actually do with the stock right now. So, we can see now, 1 week ago, what they said in June. So, let's just hover over the word buy. Now, we can see that today nine analysts are saying that this stock is a buy.
And they've stood strong. They've been saying that since April, according to this chart.
Okay. Now, not only are we showing you analysts predictions for price, but also all of these metrics, like revenue, earnings per share, dividends per share.
And how to read this chart is here we're looking at past data, 2025, 2024. But here, we can see that this is what the analysts are saying the revenue will be in 2027. So, right now it has been this, but in 2027, it's they're forecasting that it will go up.
In 2028, it'll be even higher, they're saying.
And so, it's on a steady incline, which is good to see for this uh forecast from these analysts.
All right.
Um if you keep scrolling down, you can see more uh forecasts.
You can even come down all the way to the bottom.
There's just so many charts. It goes on and on, and I want to show you um towards the bottom where you can see actually um here are is what the company has been saying about the stock. And you can see what brokerage um whether they said it it will be outperforming, or if it's a hold, or a buy. You can see actually who it was that said it.
So, that's a really helpful page, as well.
Okay, again, let me know if you have any questions at all.
All right, next is this DCF calculator.
And again, the best way to analyze a stock is going through all of these tabs right here.
So, that's what I'm That's what we're going through right now. So, next up is DCF.
All right. So, the DCF calculator is a great way to see um based on what the current stock price is, you can see what the model actually thinks it's worth.
So, um based on our data, we believe that calculating DCF with earnings per share has been more accurate. You can always change it to free cash flow if you'd like, but free cash flow is less consistent um and we found that earnings per share is more consistent. So, that's why we defaulted to that.
Now, here you can see the growth stage.
Every company has a growth stage and a terminal stage, and they're both defaulted to 10 years.
Now, what we're looking at here, so it's saying that based on um this graph that we're looking at here, uh the stock's current price is about 19% higher than what the model thinks it's worth. So, the margin of safety is therefore 19%.
And you can go in and adjust things if you have a certain uh preference for how you'd like to look at the DCF calculator.
And then, what this reverse DCF model is doing is it's looking at today's stock price, and it's asking how much would this company need to grow for today's price of 354 to make sense? So, it's saying that it would need to grow 18.63% for this price to make sense. Now, some people um find a DCF calculator really helpful.
Others don't look at it at all. It's definitely up to you. Um there's so many more aspects of the stock to look at. This is just one of those aspects that some people really invest uh by.
All right. Again, let me know if you have any questions.
Um the next thing I'll show you is that we have other calculators, too, like the WACC calculator.
And many other calculators, as well. If you go to this calculator page, you can go to the dividend calculator.
You can put in the company, like let's say Visa, and then you can see the share price.
Here it's showing you what their dividend is.
You can say, "Okay, let's say I invested $10,000 and I waited 10 years." And then it will show you that you would have made $736 um just from dividends. So, this is a great way to consider um investing in dividend stocks and calculate how much you could make just from uh dividends.
Okay.
So, speaking of dividends, let's take a look.
Let's take a look at the dividends tab.
I saw someone said, "Speak near the microphone." I definitely can.
Okay.
So, this is going to show you the historical dividend history.
So, it's showing us that they went 18 years uh without reducing their dividend, but they've also gone 18 years where they did increase it.
So, here is where you can see that dividend yield history.
Which is great to see. You can see how they've done ever since they first started paying dividends.
And then right over here is where we're looking at what they paid this last quarter.
So, 67 cents. It's been pretty consistent. They used to pay 59 cents, 52. So, it's great to see that they've been increasing these last quarters.
Here are some frequently asked questions to further your research and the dividend payout ratio.
Okay.
If you're interested in bonds, that will be on this tab where you can see that they have 13 outstanding corporate bonds that we track.
Um let me know if you have any questions about that.
Now, this Guru Trades tab, this is going to show us what the gurus are doing. And for those of you who might be curious, a guru is someone who manages $100 million or more.
So, that's what makes them and qualifies them to be a guru.
And since they have so much money in the space, we like to see uh what they're doing with their money in regards to this stock. So, we can actually see what gurus are buying versus selling Visa.
So, if we scroll down a little bit, we can see the number of guru sells versus buys.
So, you can see most recently, there were more buys than sells on this chart. And then over here, we can actually see the volume of guru trades.
So, we can see how many shares were being bought, how many shares were being sold, and the average price.
And if we come down here, we can actually see the name of the guru or fund, and we can see the date at which they bought the stock.
We can see um their action, so they actually reduced their amount of shares.
And we can see here I've clicked on this little blue holdings history button.
And this allows you to see actually their history with holding the stock.
So, we can see that they first bought the stock in 2015 of quarter four.
They bought a little more, kept consistently holding it, but then it slowly started to drop, and they have been reducing pretty much ever since.
So, you can always inspect what the investor how long they've been holding it. It's great to look at this.
And then here's where you can just see investors who currently hold this stock.
So, there's 39 tracked gurus here that have this stock right now.
You can also always download this or search for a certain guru as well.
Okay.
Now, similarly to that page, there is the insiders page where you can now see what the insiders are doing. So, let's take a look at what those people who actually work at the company, what they're doing. So, we can see most recently they have been selling over the last um few months and years.
Now, we can also see again the volume of insider trades versus the number of insider trades.
And so, if we look here, we can now again see the CEO, the chief financial officer, general counsel, um and again, selling is not always necessarily a bad indicator. They might be receiving shares as part of their pay, and they just regularly sell some of them.
Um Some and if someone has sold out of them, we'll have that indicated here.
So, that's something to look out for and be aware of. It's always good to uh take a look at this.
Now, [snorts] this interactive chart. Okay, someone asked, "Why is the number of guru buys trades up, but sell volume is greater?"
So, if we go to guru trades, the number of guru trades So, most recently, there were more gurus that bought versus sold. But, so that's just looking at how many people sold versus bought. But, the volume is looking at how much they actually bought, each person individually, and it's combined into this total number we're seeing here. So, it means that the reason why the volume is higher for sales is when looking at this chart, it's telling us that um although there were more people who bought, the people who sold sold way more than the amount of shares that the people bought ended up buying. So, there was just more total sales um than total buys, even though it took more people to buy. So, yes, there can always be a big difference between volume and number of guru trades.
Okay.
Let's take a look at the interactive chart.
So, this is where you can chart fundamental and technical data all in one spot.
So, right now what we're looking at is the price.
You can see how it's changed over the years. We're looking at ever since uh they first started. You can click on 30 year. You can click on the last 5 years.
And so, what we can do here is we can actually um I'm going to show you just how valuable the the GF Value is because I can actually come over here on the left and add any of these metrics to the chart. So, let's start with GF Value.
When we add this, we can now see just how powerful the GF Value has been.
So, what we're looking at here with this chart is that the green is the GF Value and the blue is Visa's price. So, right here in this range, we can see that the GF Value was saying that Visa was trading way higher than it was actually worth. And then eventually, you see right here that the market caught up with what the GF Value was saying.
And then we took another look at their fundamentals. The GF Value is constantly analyzing um how the company is doing.
And so, you can see here that in 2022, in August, it started to rise and rise even higher.
And then eventually, the market once again finally caught up.
So, when the GF Value started to decrease, the stock also decreased as well. So, right now we can see that the GF Value is much higher than the price and if it's anything like this chart as data as the data has shown, this GF Value has been a really good indicator for spotting um when the price is actually a lot higher than what it is currently trading for.
Okay.
And then we have all of these other technical and fundamental indicators that you can add. So, any of these ratios, you can look at different income statements.
You can look at technical indicators as well.
And if there's one you're looking for that you can't find, just search it here and add it to the chart.
As well as if there's one that um if you're just wanting to totally start from scratch and you want Guru AI to build it for you, that's a very nice feature we have here.
Just click on Guru AI.
Now, just talk to it in plain language.
Say what you want on the chart and press generate and now it will be added to the chart.
Okay, I see a question here. Someone asked, "Is GF Value Guru Focus Value?"
Yes, it is.
That is just the abbreviation for it.
So, yes, GF Value and Guru Focus Value are the exact same thing.
Now, you can also look at it quarterly or over the last trailing 12 months as well.
And then if you'd like, you can come over here to this compare tab, click on compare, and now it will auto-populate some of Visa's competitors. So, we can take a look at MasterCard, too, and see how their GF Value has been doing with their uh price as well.
So, you can see here once again with MasterCard, uh the GF Value was a lot higher than its current price and the market eventually caught up.
So, GF Value the GF Value indicates here for MasterCard that they're also a little um they're overvalued.
Or significantly undervalued as you can see here that the GF value is much higher than their current price.
Okay.
Now next, I'd like to show you that you can always add this to your dashboard by just pressing dashboard and now it will be on your home page.
And then you can always press the save button and say save current settings as template. So that way anytime you go to a stock's interactive chart, you can always have the same details plotted each time.
Okay.
And you can also always download it right here. You can share it with friends.
Or you can just press this little refresh button to start from scratch and delete all of the data you were looking at.
And then this button allows you to put it in full screen.
Okay, again, let me know if there's any questions at all. I'd love to answer them.
Now next is this filings This is where you can see any new recent filings. They're all here nicely organized for you.
So we can see um any new releases, any change in ownership, and all other documents are all right here for you.
Okay, again, let me know if you have any questions.
Now next is this transcripts tab.
This is where you can see the earnings call transcripts.
And of course, as we know, earnings call transcripts are very lengthy and time-consuming to read sometimes.
So that's why we have the show key points button. I'm going to give it a click.
And now we can see instantly we're briefed with all of the positive and negative aspects of each earnings call transcript. So, you can get a good read for how the company has been doing over the quarters.
You can also ask Guru AI to summarize it for you and just talk with it about certain pros and cons of these different um news that has been going on.
Now, speaking let's take a look at this tab. So, this news tab is going to show you over here on the right we're looking at all of the major headlines about this stock. So, we can see um other companies have been writing articles about them. And then over here on the left, this is where you can see all of the GuruFocus writers, what they're saying about the stock.
So, we can see there are many articles a day that are being written.
This is a great page to be briefed with anything that's going on with the stock you can see.
Okay.
Now, I will show you this tab called compare tab.
This is where you can see Visa's competitors. So, if we scroll down, it's showing you if you liked Visa, you might also be interested in some of these that are their competitors.
Now, some of these, if you're interested in investing in only US companies, some of these are not. So, you can easily just remove some of the ones that maybe if you don't want to see those.
And if there's one that you believe you'd like to compare to Visa, just add it right here. So, even if you wanted to compare Netflix, um you know, they're not in the same category, but you can just see the current price, the predictability rank, how their revenue compares, their market cap.
And you can also always change uh the different metrics you're looking at here. So, you can move them around, reorder them, but also you can just press this little plus button.
And now you could add any of these metrics to your view. So, here are the categories of metrics you can choose from.
Just search for one if you don't want to look through, and add it to your view.
And now you can um it's not going to filter out any companies, but you can just see where they stand with the metrics you care about.
And we also have some different GuruFocus views if you're interested in more of the dividend side of the company.
Now you can see all these dividend metrics.
If you're interested in their performance, here are the metrics we believe are good to look at when analyzing performance.
Maybe you care more about growth. So, here are some book growth rates to look at as well. So, this is a great tab for that.
Now let's go to the stock PDF page.
And this is downloadable, printable, and shareable. This is where you can see all of these tabs that we just went over. You can now look at all aspects of the stock. So, you can print it out, um really take a deep look at these charts, and it can be super helpful. It goes on and on.
There's all of these pages of data for you to see.
Okay.
Here on this ownership tab, you can see uh the insider ownership and the institutional ownership.
You can see the how it correlates with the shares outstanding.
You can see the date and the percentage of institutional ownership and here are the shares.
All right, let me know if you have any questions and then here's where you can see the operating data.
You can also see it quarterly if you'd prefer.
And then we have this checklist. So, this is just for you to see and you can after you've inspected a stock, you can come here to the checklist if you'd like and it's a good way to maybe help you make a decision because you can look at um you know, do you believe it's a high quality business? It helps you plot your thoughts and come up with a decision for the stock.
Okay, I see question here about why institutional ownership and float percentage total is not 100. So, the total is not 100 because it's just saying um what percent of the ownership is institutional versus the float percentage. So, that's why we're seeing those different numbers.
And then this definitions page right here, this is going to show you some of those terms you saw throughout the page that you might be interested in learning more about. Again, just give it a click and it'll take you to their page.
All right. Um I hope you all have learned a lot from this overview. Now you fully know all of these tabs. You can easily analyze a stock and this is a really great way to um look at a stock and decide whether or not you'd like to invest in it.
And again, uh please consider joining a trial if you haven't yet. We're really excited for you to join. We know you'll love it. And thank you all so much for joining today.
I really appreciate it and we will see you next time. Have a wonderful day.
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