Today marks the public launch of Golden Valley Research. This is the first issue of what will be a weekly research journal documenting how I think about markets, how I build and refine a quantitative scoring system, and how I manage a real Roth IRA using that framework.
I want to be upfront about what this is and what it isn't. This is not a professional newsletter, not investment advice, and not the work of someone with a track record worth following blindly. It's a transparent, honest account of one person building a systematic approach to stock selection and being willing to show the process — including the mistakes — in public.
The portfolio has been live since September 18, 2025. All performance figures reflect investment returns only — cash deposits have been stripped out so the numbers represent actual market gains and losses, not contributions.
What is the GVR Scoring System?
The GVR (Golden Valley Research) system scores stocks across four dimensions, each weighted 25% for a composite score from 0 to 100:
Valuation (25%) — TTM P/E, EV/EBITDA, P/FCF, forward PE compression ratio, and PEG ratio. Sector-adjusted thresholds mean a 10x P/E scores differently for a materials company than a software company.
Growth (25%) — Revenue growth, EPS growth, gross margin trend, operating income growth, FCF growth, and EPS beat consistency. All measured year-over-year on a trailing twelve month basis.
Profitability (25%) — Gross margin, operating margin, FCF margin, ROE, net margin, and ROA. Margin metrics compared against Damodaran sector medians. ROE and ROA use universal thresholds.
Revisions (25%) — EPS estimate momentum over 30 and 90 days, analyst upgrade/downgrade breadth, and estimate dispersion. Sourced from Alpha Vantage earnings estimates data.
Signals: 85+ = STRONG BUY, 70+ = BUY, 55+ = WATCH, 40+ = NEUTRAL, 25+ = WEAK, below 25 = AVOID.
This Week: Full Holdings Review
This week I ran the GVR scorer across all five of my current holdings and cross-referenced the scores against my original investment theses. Here's the summary:
| Ticker | Company | GVR Score | Signal | Decision |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| CSTM | Constellium SE | 73.84 | BUY | Hold |
| CRDO | Credo Technology | 68.41 | WATCH | Hold — trimmed Friday |
| CLS | Celestica Inc. | 66.46 | WATCH | Hold |
| CLSK | CleanSpark Inc. | 37.27* | PARTIAL | Hold — pending rescore |
| ASTI | Ascent Solar | 23.96 | AVOID | Hold — lottery ticket |
*CLSK receives a partial score due to a sector misclassification bug in the GVR system — Alpha Vantage returns "Financials" for Bitcoin miners, which causes the valuation and profitability modules to skip. This is a known issue being fixed.
A Bug We Fixed Live
One of the more interesting discoveries this week was a sector mismatch in the GVR profitability module. CSTM (Constellium) — an aluminum manufacturer — was being benchmarked against software company margin medians. A 14% gross margin looks catastrophic vs. a 55% tech median, but it's completely normal for a basic materials company. After fixing the sector mapping, CSTM's profitability score jumped from 38.45 to 57.05 and its overall GVR score moved from 71.94 to 73.84. The system is only as good as its benchmarks — this is the kind of thing you only catch by running it on real positions.
What's Next
Next week I'll be running the GVR scorer across a 100+ stock watchlist and publishing the full leaderboard. I'll also be building a second screening system focused on asymmetric setups — stocks with strong fundamentals that have been significantly dislocated from their intrinsic value due to sentiment or macro fears.
The goal is to eventually use GVR as the foundation of a systematic, rules-based portfolio — with a separate allocation for higher-risk asymmetric opportunities. More on that soon.