Top Piotroski F-Score Stocks (2026)

The Piotroski F-Score is a checklist, not a forecast. Accounting professor Joseph Piotroski published it in 2000 to separate financially strengthening companies from weakening ones using nothing but their annual financial statements. Each of nine yes/no tests compares the latest annual filing with the year before and earns one point when passed, so the score runs from 0 to 9.

The nine signals fall into three groups. Profitability (4): return on assets is positive; operating cash flow is positive; return on assets improved; operating cash flow exceeds net income, so earnings are backed by cash. Leverage and liquidity (3): debt to assets fell; the current ratio rose; the diluted share count did not grow. Operating efficiency (2): gross margin rose; asset turnover rose.

Reading a score: 8 or 9 means nearly every test passed. The company is profitable, its earnings are backed by cash, and its balance sheet and margins improved on the year. 0 to 3 means most tests failed, often a mix of losses, rising leverage, dilution or shrinking margins, which is worth understanding before anything else. 4 to 7 is mixed; open the stock page to see which signals passed. The F-Score says nothing about price: a 9/9 company can be expensive. It is also backward-looking, so a downturn that has not reached the annual accounts yet will not show.

How this list is built: only companies scored on Piotroski's original nine signals are ranked. Banks, insurers, REITs, utilities, asset managers and holding companies are scored on adapted eight-signal checklists on AlphaStocks, so they are left out rather than compared on a different scale. At least seven of the nine signals must be computable from the filings, and a signal that cannot be computed counts as not passed. Stocks with the same F-Score are ordered by composite score.