Education · Worked Examples
Real companies. Real filings. The model's actual numbers.
Each walkthrough starts from a company's public fundamentals and shows how every valuation method reads them — what fired, what abstained, what got excluded, and why the blend landed where it did. The post-mortems go further: what the model showed at the time, what followed, and what it got wrong. All figures are archived model outputs, not reconstructions after the fact.
From the 10-K to a fair value estimate
One sector archetype per walkthrough — each teaches a different part of the method toolkit.
Apple, from the 10-K to a fair value estimate
Why book-value methods get little weight for a company that earns 140% on equity, and how the earnings cluster anchors the blend.
How the model values a bank: JPMorgan
Banks get no DCF, no EV/EBITDA, and no P/S. What they get instead - and why four independent methods land within 10% of each other.
Valuing a regulated utility: NextEra Energy
Why the dividend discount model carries the largest weight of any method in any sector, and why DCF breaks on heavy capex.
Valuing a cyclical at the wrong moment: Exxon Mobil
Trailing P/E says one thing, forward P/E says another. How cycle-aware methods like CAPE and mid-cycle P/E referee the disagreement.
REIT valuation without the P/E trap: Realty Income
A REIT at 50x earnings is not expensive the way a tech stock at 50x is. FFO, AFFO, and NAV - the three lenses built for real estate.
Valuing software after the growth premium: Salesforce
When revenue growth slows, the model moves a software company from a sales-multiple profile to an earnings-and-cash profile. What that switch does to fair value.
What the model cannot see in biotech: Vertex
Trial outcomes are binary and invisible to trailing fundamentals. An honest tour of where quantitative valuation works in biotech - and where it goes quiet.
Model post-mortems
What the model showed, and what followed — reconstructed from our own archived history, misses included. Single episodes are illustrations, not evidence; the evidence-grade view is the live factor diagnostics on the methodology page.
Post-mortem: Micron and a momentum score of 100
The momentum pillar maxed out in late March. What the other pillars did while the price more than doubled - including the one that fell the whole way up.
Post-mortem: Charter, when cheap got cheaper
The value pillar scored Charter in the high 80s all spring. The stock fell 37%. What the composite saw that the single pillar did not.
Post-mortem: why our Apple fair value moved
From $222 to $116 to $276 in nine weeks - on the same stock. A transparent account of what coverage and calibration do to a model estimate.
Post-mortem: the $17.00 that wasn't
For nine weeks our row for one small-cap showed the same price while the market moved without us. A data-pipeline failure, what it cost, and what we changed.
Equity Rank is an educational research platform, not a registered investment adviser. All scores and fair value figures are model estimates under stated assumptions, provided for education and information only — not investment advice, not recommendations, and not predictions of future prices. Historical episodes are individual examples and are not evidence of repeatable results.