Learning Mode glossary
Plain-language explanations of the metrics StockProof shows. Every word here is written by hand and checked into the codebase — nothing on this page is generated, and no model is involved in producing it.
Turn Learning Mode on in the header and these explanations also appear inline beside the figures themselves — on the ratio cards, the Trace Score breakdown and the capital-gains page — as small panels you can expand where you need them.
These explain how a measure is constructed and what it can and cannot tell you. None of them is a view on whether any investment is worth making, and nothing here is investment advice.
What the market pays today for one rupee of last year's profit.
P/E = Price ÷ (Net Income ÷ Diluted Shares Outstanding)
P/E divides the share price by earnings per share. If a share costs ₹300 and the company earned ₹15 per share, the P/E is 20 — buyers are paying twenty rupees for each rupee of annual profit.
A high P/E is not automatically 'expensive' and a low one is not automatically 'cheap'. A high number can mean the market expects profits to grow, or that the last year's profit was unusually low. A low number can mean the market expects profits to fall. P/E on its own says nothing about whether a price is justified — it is a starting question, not an answer.
P/E is undefined when a company made a loss, because dividing by a negative or zero profit produces a figure that cannot be read the normal way. StockProof shows N/A rather than a negative P/E.
In StockProof StockProof computes this from the latest cached price and the net income and diluted share count in the most recent filing on file. The historical P/E chart uses a different basis — filed annual EPS against an adjusted closing price — so the two figures are not directly comparable and are never differenced.
Introduction to the price-to-earnings ratio ↗ Khan Academy — external link, not StockProof content, last checked 2026-08-31
How much profit the company generated per rupee of shareholders' own money.
ROE = Net Income ÷ Shareholder Equity
ROE divides net income by shareholders' equity — the money owners have put in plus the profits kept in the business rather than paid out. An ROE of 18% means the business turned every ₹100 of owners' capital into ₹18 of annual profit.
ROE is flattered by debt. A company that funds itself heavily with borrowing has less equity in the denominator, so the same profit produces a higher ROE. Two companies with identical ROE can carry completely different risk, which is why ROE is read next to Debt/Equity rather than on its own — and why the DuPont decomposition below exists.
In StockProof Equity here is the figure filed in the most recent annual or quarterly statement. For banks and NBFCs the composite differs from a manufacturer's, which is why the source-trace line under each figure names the exact filed line item used.
Splits ROE into three parts, so you can see whether it came from margin, efficiency, or debt.
ROE = (Net Income ÷ Revenue) × (Revenue ÷ Total Assets) × (Total Assets ÷ Equity)
The same ROE can be produced three very different ways. DuPont breaks it into Net Profit Margin × Asset Turnover × Equity Multiplier — how much profit each rupee of sales leaves, how much sales each rupee of assets generates, and how many rupees of assets sit on each rupee of equity.
A luxury brand reaches its ROE through margin. A supermarket reaches a similar ROE through turnover on thin margins. A leveraged lender reaches it through the equity multiplier. Only the third of those raises ROE by raising risk, and a single ROE number cannot tell you which of the three you are looking at.
This is why a rise in ROE is worth taking apart before it is treated as good news: an ROE that improved because the company borrowed more is a different fact from an ROE that improved because margins widened.
In StockProof StockProof does not yet render the three-way split as its own view — it is on the roadmap. The explanation is here because it is the right way to read the ROE figure shown beside it.
Return on ALL the long-term money in the business, borrowed as well as owned.
ROCE = EBIT ÷ (Total Equity + Total Debt)
ROCE divides operating profit (EBIT) by capital employed — equity plus debt. Where ROE asks what the owners earned, ROCE asks what the whole business earned on every rupee financed into it, whoever supplied that rupee.
Because the denominator includes debt, ROCE is not flattered by borrowing the way ROE is. That makes it the more comparable figure across companies with different capital structures, and the usual first check on whether a business is genuinely productive or merely leveraged.
A useful reference point is the company's own cost of borrowing: a business earning a ROCE below what it pays on its debt is consuming value on each additional rupee it employs.
In StockProof For lenders (banks, NBFCs, housing finance companies) the balance sheet has no current/non-current split and Finance Costs are close to a core operating cost rather than a financing item. StockProof still shows ROCE for those filers but prints an explicit caveat beside it — that caveat is not part of Learning Mode and shows whether or not this mode is on.
How many rupees the company has borrowed for each rupee of owners' money.
Debt / Equity = Total Debt ÷ Shareholder Equity
A Debt/Equity of 0.5 means fifty paise of borrowing per rupee of equity; a figure of 2.0 means two rupees of borrowing per rupee of equity. It is the plainest single measure of how much of the business is funded by lenders rather than owners.
Borrowing is not itself a fault. It magnifies outcomes in both directions: the same leverage that lifts returns in a good year deepens losses in a bad one, and interest has to be paid whether or not the year was good. What counts as a lot depends entirely on the industry — a utility with contracted cash flows and a cyclical commodity producer are not comparable on this number.
Financial companies are the clearest case: for a bank or an NBFC, borrowing IS the raw material of the business, so a Debt/Equity that would be alarming for a manufacturer is ordinary for a lender.
In StockProof Both figures come from the same filing, so the ratio is internally consistent even when the filing itself is restated later.
When you sell part of a holding, the oldest units you bought are treated as the ones sold.
If you bought 100 shares in 2022 and another 100 in 2025, then sold 120, FIFO treats that sale as all 100 of the 2022 lot plus 20 of the 2025 lot. It is not an average — each sold unit keeps the cost and the purchase date of the specific lot it came from.
That matters for two reasons at once. The cost side sets the gain, and the date side sets whether the gain is short-term or long-term. One sale can therefore produce both kinds of gain at the same time, when it draws from lots bought on different dates.
FIFO is the standard basis for Indian listed equity, which is why it is the basis used here rather than an average-cost method.
In StockProof StockProof's transaction ledger applies FIFO per lot, per portfolio. Every sale row on the capital-gains page shows which purchase lots it consumed, so the classification can be traced back rather than taken on trust.
Gains are classified by how long the units were held before being sold.
For listed equity in India, a lot held for more than twelve months from purchase to sale produces a long-term capital gain (LTCG); twelve months or less produces a short-term capital gain (STCG). The clock runs per lot, from that lot's own purchase date.
The two are taxed under different rules and are never added together into a single 'total gain'. Keeping them apart is not a presentation choice — a combined figure would not correspond to anything in the tax computation.
Because the holding period is measured per lot, a single sale can produce an STCG line and an LTCG line simultaneously. See FIFO matching above for why.
In StockProof StockProof classifies every realized sale this way and groups the results by Indian financial year (April–March). It stores no tax rate and no exemption threshold: rates change, they differ by taxpayer, and a stored rate would silently go stale. The optional rate calculator on that page is never persisted.
An equal-weighted average of four signals StockProof already computes, shown only when at least two are available.
The Trace Score averages four components — Fundamentals Momentum, Growth Consistency, Earnings Quality and Sector Standing — each scored 0–100 and each weighted equally. Nothing new is measured; every component is a signal that already exists elsewhere on the site and links back to its own page.
A component with no data on file contributes nothing rather than scoring zero, because 'we could not measure this' and 'this measured badly' are different facts. If fewer than two of the four are available the composite is withheld entirely.
The score is deliberately never given a word like 'good', 'strong' or 'quality'. It is a number with a stated construction and a visible breakdown, and it is not a view on whether the share is worth owning.
In StockProof P/E is excluded from the composite on purpose: it is a valuation measure, not a business-quality measure, and folding it in would quietly turn the score into a cheapness ranking.
The Piotroski F-Score: nine pass/fail checks on whether the financial position improved year on year.
Piotroski's nine criteria test profitability, leverage/liquidity and operating efficiency — is the company profitable, is cash flow backing the profit, is debt falling, are margins and asset turnover improving. Each is a yes/no, and the score is how many were met.
It is a momentum measure, not a level measure: it rewards a business that got better this year, which is not the same as a business that is good. A strong company having an ordinary year can score modestly.
Criteria whose inputs are missing from the filings on file are excluded from both the numerator and the denominator, so the score reads as 'N of M met' rather than silently penalising incomplete data.
Whether revenue and profit compounded steadily over five years, rather than in one lucky jump.
This component reads the five-year compound annual growth rates for revenue and profit. Compounding is the point: a business that grew every year is scored differently from one whose five-year average was carried by a single exceptional year.
Five years of annual filings must actually be on file for this to be computed. Recently listed companies frequently have less history than that, and the component is then marked unavailable rather than estimated from a shorter window.
Whether reported profit is backed by cash actually collected.
Profit is an accounting figure and cash flow is a bank figure, and they can diverge for entirely legitimate reasons — a growing business funding more receivables and inventory will report profit ahead of cash. Persistent, large divergence is the thing worth noticing.
This component flags where reported profit is running well ahead of operating cash flow. It is a prompt to go and read the cash flow statement, not a finding of wrongdoing, and it is not evidence of anything on its own.
Where the company's ROE, ROCE and Debt/Equity sit against the other companies in its own sector.
Each of the three ratios is turned into a percentile against the same sector, and the component is the mean of whichever percentiles could be computed. Debt/Equity is inverted first, so that less borrowing scores higher on the same 0–100 scale as the other two.
Comparing within a sector is the whole point: absolute ROE and Debt/Equity are not comparable between a software company and a bank, and a cross-sector ranking would mostly be measuring which industry a company happens to be in.
Sector membership comes from NSE's own published classification, and a sector with very few companies on file gives a percentile that is technically correct and practically weak.
Asked something this glossary does not cover? AI Mode answers general finance concepts and is capped per day. It refuses anything naming a specific company and anything asking what to buy, sell or hold.