Deciding what to buy next

The screener searches the whole universe Quantic tracks. It opens on a handful of starting points — quality first, safe and growing, aristocrats, monthly payers — and everything else folds away behind More filters, so you pick a direction before you pick numbers. Compare puts two to four stocks side by side on the same measures, which is usually faster than reading two pages in turn.

The buy plan is the opinionated one. It scores everything you hold or watch across nine factors: quality, dividend growth, how far below your target it trades, how underweight it is, whether you would be averaging down, where it sits in its 52-week range, whether it pays in your thin months, whether its sector is under-represented, and how clean its balance sheet is.

Every factor shows its own badge, so the ranking explains itself instead of asking you to trust a number. You can also re-weight them: if averaging down is what you care about, turn the others down and the list re-orders.

One thing the screener deliberately does not do is put the biggest yield at the top. Yield is the dividend divided by the price, so a company whose price has collapsed shows a magnificent one — sorting by it first is how people find falling knives. Quantic leads with its own 0-10 read on the company instead, and marks the yield in red when the numbers look like a trap: a very high yield beside a dividend that has stopped growing, or one earnings can't cover.

It marks them rather than hiding them, because sometimes the market is wrong and that is your call. If you'd rather not see them at all, More filters has a switch — and it keeps the stocks nobody has assessed yet, so you are never quietly shown only the corner of the market that happens to have been scanned.