Screener Numbers Disagree, and the Filing Settles It

Why does one screener say 27.5 and another say 20? Same stock, same day, same price.

The usual answer is that both are right. They’re dividing the same price by different earnings.

Five reasons the same stock gets different numbers

The gaps come from choices about inputs. Each choice is defensible. They just aren’t the same choice.

• Period. One tool uses the trailing twelve months, the last four reported quarters added together. Another uses the last full fiscal year. That figure can be most of a year stale.
• GAAP or adjusted. GAAP earnings follow accounting standards. Adjusted earnings strip out items management calls unusual. Restructuring charges, stock-based compensation and amortization of acquired intangibles are common exclusions, and the list differs from one company to the next, which is why adjusted numbers from two companies in the same industry can’t always be compared directly either.
• Share count. Diluted EPS counts the shares that options, warrants and convertible securities could add. Basic EPS doesn’t. For a company with lots of stock compensation, the gap is real.
• Update lag. Some tools refresh within hours of a filing. Others take days. For a stretch after earnings, one screen will be using the new quarter while another still shows the old one, so the same stock can look cheap on one tool and expensive on the other until the slower one catches up.
• One-off items. A large gain on an asset sale or a big write-down can be left in, taken out, or handled by a data vendor’s own rules, and the tool rarely tells you which on the results page.

Stack two or three together and the gap gets wide.

A worked example

Take a hypothetical company over one twelve-month period.

Neither number is wrong. Both come from the same income statement.

The gap is $0.45 a share. That’s the cost management chose to exclude from its adjusted figure. Whether those costs belong in your view of what the business earns is the judgment you’re making when you pick between the two P/E ratios, and most people make it without realizing, simply by using whichever tool they opened first.

Rule 1: Know which definition your tool uses

Find the glossary. Most screeners and quote pages have a page of field definitions, sometimes linked from a small info icon next to the column header, and it will say whether P/E uses trailing or fiscal-year earnings, GAAP or adjusted, diluted or basic.

If a tool won’t tell you, treat its numbers as approximate. Clear definitions are worth checking for in any stock screener before you pay for one.

Rule 2: Check any number you’d trade on against the filing

Screens are for finding candidates. Before a figure goes into a trade, pull it from the source.

The 10-Q covers each quarter and the 10-K covers the full year with audited statements; both are on EDGAR, and both report GAAP earnings per share, basic and diluted, right on the face of the income statement. The walkthrough on reading a 10-K shows where each line sits.

For adjusted figures, go to the earnings release. Regulation G, the SEC rule on non-GAAP measures, requires any adjusted figure to come with a bridge back to its nearest GAAP equivalent, so the release will have a table walking from one to the other, line by line, and that table is where you decide which adjustments you accept.

Read that table across several quarters. A restructuring charge that shows up once is plausibly unusual. One that shows up every quarter for three years is a cost of running the business, and an adjusted EPS that keeps excluding it is flattering the company every single time.

Rule 3: Take cash figures from the cash flow statement

Free cash flow is where tools diverge most, since there’s no single official definition.

Most compute it as operating cash flow minus capital expenditures. Some subtract other items. Some run the figures through a vendor’s own standardization first.

Go to the cash flow statement in the filing. Take cash from operations and subtract purchases of property and equipment. It takes a minute, and you end up with a number whose inputs you can see.

Rule 4: Note the date of the data

Every number in a screen is as of some date. Check it.

Right after earnings season, some tools will be a quarter behind, and a company that just reported a sharp drop in profit can still screen as cheap on the old numbers for days. If the field shows a date, compare it with the filing date on EDGAR. No date shown? Compare the latest quarter in the financials tab with the most recent 10-Q.

The price side can lag too. Some quote pages show delayed prices, and some screeners recompute ratios only once a day, so on a day the stock moves hard, a P/E taken at the open and one taken at the close are two different numbers from two different prices.

Where the rules relax

For a quick first pass, consistency within one tool matters more than the definition.

If you’re scanning a few thousand stocks for a rough shortlist, every company gets measured the same way, and the ranking will be close enough whichever definition sits underneath. Mixing tools is what causes trouble: a P/E from one screener next to a P/E from another can make two companies look further apart, or closer together, than they are.

So pick one tool for screening and stick with it. Switch to the filing for the names that make the shortlist, and even then only for the numbers the decision rests on, since checking every field of every candidate against EDGAR would take all week and change almost nothing.