How Valarth works out its numbers

• Company filings with NSE and BSE: quarterly and annual results, shareholding patterns including promoter pledges, disclosures and announcements, annual reports and investor presentations, and the XBRL versions of the filings. A company listed only on BSE is read from BSE.
• Prices: market data feeds during market hours, and the exchanges' end-of-day price files, adjusted for bonuses and splits.
• Mutual funds: AMFI's NAVs, fund performance data (benchmarks, returns, fund size) and expense ratios, and each fund house's monthly portfolio disclosure in the format SEBI sets.

The company pages are built from the filings and Valarth's own arithmetic on them. Every page shows the date its data was last refreshed.

• Prices: every 15 minutes in market hours on trading days, and once more after the close.
• New filings and documents: every evening.
• Derived figures and the forensic scores: overnight.
• Mutual fund data: overnight, as AMFI and the fund houses publish it.
• Valuations: run in batches rather than on a fixed clock; each company page says how old its valuation is.

Results and shareholding arrive when companies file them, within the deadlines SEBI sets (results 45 days after a quarter ends, 60 for the March quarter; shareholding 21 days).

Each company is first sorted into one of fourteen kinds of business, from a stable compounder to a distressed or declining company. Each kind has its own set of valuation methods and fixed, published weights for combining them into a value range. A method without the inputs it needs is dropped and the weights of the rest are rescaled, and the page says so. All the arithmetic is done by code, not by a language model.

• Cheap: the price is below the bottom of the range, or below its middle with a P/E under the peer median.
• Dear: the price is above the top of the range, or above its middle with a P/E at least 25% over the peer median.
• Fair: everything in between.

Confidence (high, medium or low) comes from how complete and how consistent the inputs are, and drops a level when the methods disagree widely or the peer P/E points the other way. Where no recent valuation can be used, the peer P/E and P/B decide on their own and the confidence is low. Loss-making companies and companies with no stored statements get no view.

A valuation is held for review, and not shown, when it looks implausible: a middle value more than twice or less than half the price, simulations that land almost entirely on one side of the price, or margins that look to be at a peak. Every day a sample of company pages is also read by a separate model acting as a sceptical investor, and what it finds goes to a list of fixes; it does not change any score.

The valuation methods guide explains each method with a worked example, and the valuation reports show complete valuations step by step.

The forensic score says which companies' accounts deserve a closer read first. It is an audit priority, never an accusation: a flag means "worth checking", not "fraud".

• For most companies: accruals and signs of earnings management, whether reported profit turns into cash, and the risk of distress.
• For every company: promoter pledges and stake changes, new equity raised, money parked outside the business, and governance events in the filings.
• For banks and other lenders, in place of the first set: asset quality, provisions, capital and funding. Insurers, brokers and exchanges are not scored.

Each measure is compared with the company's sector peers in the same year and with its own past, and published models (Beneish, Dechow, Altman, Ohlson, Montier) are read at the cut-offs their authors set. The result is a tier: green, amber or red. A red reached on thin data is shown as such, with its confidence. The forensic red flags guide explains each check with an example.

A fund's returns against its benchmark, its size and its costs are AMFI's own figures; Valarth adds only ranks and flows. What a fund holds comes from the fund house's monthly portfolio. Measures of the companies inside a fund are the holdings weighted by each company's own figures, and are not given when less than 60% of the fund can be matched to listed companies.

• Public company pages cover the largest companies in each SEBI market-cap bucket, and a page is published only when every section can be filled. The full valuation range, the forensic scorecard and the full peer table are in the app.
• Figures can be late or wrong when a filing is late or a feed is wrong. Each company page has a section on what it does not tell you.
• Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation. Valarth is not a SEBI-registered investment adviser or research analyst. See the disclaimer.

Questions or a figure that looks wrong: the help page. Who is behind Valarth: the about page.