About CycleIQ
Spotting when a business turns is a forecasting problem, and not a new one. Inside banks, retailers and utilities, quants have always done this work: building the models, running the numbers every quarter, arguing about what they mean. It rarely leaves the building.
CycleIQ is that discipline turned outward. Decades of institutional forecasting sit behind how a cycle is defined here, what counts as evidence, and what we refuse to claim: judgments made once, then applied the same way to every company, every quarter. What comes out is the part an investor actually needs, in plain English: where a business sits in its own cycle, why, and what would change it.
Businesses move in cycles. Demand strengthens and fades, margins expand and compress, and costs catch up with revenue. Those turns show up in a company's filings long before most people read them. CycleIQ reads them for you.
We cover about 2,200 operating companies: every company that files quarterly and annual reports (10-Q and 10-K) with the SEC, with at least $50 million in revenue over the last twelve months, a quarter reported in the last six months, and at least two years of quarterly history to measure against. Banks, insurers, REITs, exchanges and commodity pools are left out because the standard business metrics don't fit them. For each one, CycleIQ builds a cycle score from a selected set of operating and profitability figures from the statements themselves. Each is measured against that company's own history, so zero is its own average: its typical level for this business. A 9% operating margin is excellent for a grocer and weak for a software company. Measuring each company against itself removes that distortion and shows whether the business is doing better or worse than it usually does, and whether that's changing.
The score's level and direction place the company in one of four phases: Recovery, Expansion, Topping or Contraction. Every company page explains the reading in plain English. It lists the metrics driving it, what complicates the reading, and what next quarter would need to show to confirm or overturn it. A chart lays the company's cycle over its quarterly share price, so you can see whether the stock has historically followed the business.
CycleIQ also connects the cycle to the people who invest in it. Using 13F filings, it shows which institutions bought or sold a company last quarter, how important the position is to them, and whether they have a record of buying or selling more than usual at that stage of a company's cycle.
- We don't take payment from the companies we cover.
- We don't manage money.
- We don't give personal investment advice, or know your circumstances.
- A phase is not a buy or sell signal.