2,000 US-listed stocks grouped by what the business looks like: valuation, profitability, growth, balance sheet, dividends and beta. The idea comes from customer segmentation, and the groups cut across sectors. Technology appears in five of the nine.
Median figures for each group, with its largest companies and subgroups.
Profitable, established businesses growing at a modest pace, often carrying debt to fund buybacks.
Industrials 24%, Consumer Discretionary 23%, Technology 16%
High margins and fast growth with little debt. Home of the mega-cap tech leaders.
Technology 42%, Healthcare 17%, Materials 11%
Thin margins and flat sales. Cheap on earnings, but sensitive to the cycle.
Consumer Discretionary 23%, Industrials 19%, Materials 12%
Revenue growing in the mid-teens on single-digit margins: retailers, distributors, industrials.
Industrials 34%, Technology 13%, Healthcare 11%
High margins, high earnings yields and low beta. Mostly banks, plus 29% non-financials with the same profile.
Financials 71%, Energy 7%, Real Estate 7%
The market's shock absorbers: cheap on earnings, paying dividends, beta well below 1.
Financials 22%, Energy 19%, Consumer Staples 15%
The highest dividends with the heaviest debt: utilities, REITs, telecoms and dividend pharma.
Real Estate 32%, Utilities 29%, Energy 12%
No repeatable split into subgroups.
Revenue up nearly 40% a year, but still losing money. The highest beta in the market.
Technology 35%, Healthcare 27%, Industrials 9%
Losing money without the growth to justify it, including former growth stories.
Technology 38%, Healthcare 33%, Consumer Discretionary 8%
No repeatable split into subgroups.
Banks show high operating margins because the data vendor reports no cost of revenue for them; don't compare that column across groups.
Search by ticker, company, sector or industry.
Share of each group's stocks in each sector. Rows add up to 100%.
| Group | Comm | Disc | Stap | Enrg | Fin | Hlth | Ind | Mat | RE | Tech | Util |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Mature franchises | 3 | 23 | 4 | 2 | 9 | 11 | 24 | 4 | 3 | 16 | 1 |
| 2 Quality growth | 5 | 8 | 2 | 2 | 8 | 17 | 7 | 11 | · | 42 | · |
| 3 Ex-growth cyclicals | 5 | 23 | 6 | 5 | 7 | 10 | 19 | 12 | 3 | 9 | 1 |
| 4 Low-margin growers | 4 | 10 | 4 | 4 | 6 | 11 | 34 | 8 | 4 | 13 | 2 |
| 5 Banks & lenders | 2 | · | 1 | 7 | 71 | 1 | 5 | 2 | 7 | 2 | · |
| 6 Low-beta value | 8 | 5 | 15 | 19 | 22 | 9 | 9 | 3 | 1 | 6 | 3 |
| 7 Yield & real assets | 3 | 6 | 5 | 12 | 1 | 3 | 7 | 2 | 32 | · | 29 |
| 8 Pre-profit growth | 5 | 7 | 1 | 2 | 8 | 27 | 9 | 4 | · | 35 | 1 |
| 9 Cash burners & broken growth | 4 | 8 | · | 3 | 2 | 33 | 4 | 4 | 1 | 38 | 2 |
Source: screener snapshot 22 September 2026. Percent of group.
Cluster on behaviour, describe with demographics: the fundamentals form the groups, while sector, size and momentum only describe them.
Valuation, profitability, growth, balance sheet, and income & risk, each weighted equally. Ratios are rebuilt from line items, so earnings yield exists for loss-makers too.
Each feature goes through a tie-aware rank-to-normal transform (so the 40% of stocks that pay no dividend don't dominate), then PCA to 9 components.
k-means runs 60 times on 80% subsamples. Groups come from how often each pair of stocks lands together, which stays repeatable where a single k-means run does not.
Nine groups was chosen, not found: 9 to 13 groups are equally repeatable (about 0.80 agreement), but only nine never produces a sliver group. Subgroups are kept only where the split repeats.
Banks, brokers and asset managers get neutral cash-flow and balance-sheet scores: their "debt" is deposits.
