Every week on Saturday morning around 7AM ET we build the Best of the Best list of the week. Later during the weekend, we validate our results by checking what Courtney publishes on his Watchlist (his Best of the Best list). This list is published for FTU and Silver Circle student. 


Timing of Information


The Stock Butler is based on the principle that Courtney taught us to do the fundamental analysis during the weekend once a week. Therefore the information on the fundamental analysis are a snapshot of the information available on the weekend. This gives us a constant and persistent fundamental analysis information for the week. This can also be the reason why you see different information from The Stock Butler and other sources of information.

To validate the time of the analysis you can look at the top of the rating detail page.


The Best of the Best list


The Best of the Best list rating is built with the stocks that are in the IBD50 of the week that pass the RS > 90 and EPS > 90 Rating filter. This filtering could leave us around 30 stocks to validate with the Fundamental Analysis. Applying the Fundamental Analysis to the 30 stocks could give us 0 to 12 stocks that have a good rating (A, B, C or Rejected).


We add to that list the stocks from the Best of the Best list of the previous week that still pass the Fundamental Analysis even if they are no longer on the IBD list. These stock are called the "Carry over" stocks. This is the reason why some stocks are not on the IBD50 but still on the Best of the Best list. The "Carry Over" stocks do not need to pass the IBD50 filtering of the EPS and RS rating. They only need to past the Fundamental Analysis.


Once a "Carry over" stock is no longer on the Best of the Best, it will need to pass by the IBD50 list again to get back in the Best of the Best list.


You can look at more information on the Facebook FTI page. This link gives you a search result for "Carry Over" or search result for "CarryOver" in the Facebook FTI page.


FTI Rating vs Courtney Best of the Best list


The list of the Best of the Best that is published by Courtney and The Stock Butler has some fine tuning.

For example:

  • RoE: A more advanced filter is applied to the Best of the Best list which is the Return On Equity filter (ROE > 15). This filter is usually learned in Courtney's advanced level course and we give it for free with our Fundamental Analysis. You can read more about it here and you can find the definition from Investopedia for the ROE.
  • EPS Trend: We learn in FTI that the EPS Trend should be "going up". An EPS Wart in a Fundamental Analysis will give a small downgrade to stock base on the % of decline in the EPS Trend.
  • Earnings Surprise and PEG: There are weightings applied to the Earnings Surprises and PEG where the Earnings Surprises have a bit more weight compared to the PEG.

These fine tunings are integrated into The Stock Butler and as a result may give slightly different grades than you would come up with.


The source of information


The time that you take the I.B.D.50 list and the type of I.B.D.Subscription that you have could result in some differences in the first filter of EPS and RS rating. The Stock Butler takes the list around 7h30 AM ET each week.


Some differences could come from the list that you are using from Investors. If you use the eTable version (table with the blue header), some values are different from the Screen Center version (table with the green header). The difference that we can see are in regards to the RS Rating which could vary by one point from 89 to 90 or 90 to 89. This impact of this is adding or removing a stock from the list the first time.




The Stock Butler and the list published by Courtney uses information from the Screen Center.


If you have special stocks that you would like to validate, you can use the Contact Support link on the right of this page to send us a request.