About The Shallows

Every night, a screener runs across more than 1,500 publicly traded companies. Each one gets evaluated on the same criteria: is the business financially healthy, is the stock trading below what it's worth, and are the people running it putting their own money in? The results get published. The methodology is visible. The conclusions are yours to make.

That's the core of what this is.

What We Publish

The Insider Digest tracks SEC Form 4 filings — the disclosures executives are required to file when they buy or sell their own company's stock. When a CFO puts $2 million of personal money into shares, or a board member has been quietly accumulating for three months, that's information worth having. We parse the filings so you don't have to.

Stock of the Week is one name from the screener each week. Not a recommendation — a walkthrough. Here's what the DCF model says the business is worth, here's what the balance sheet looks like, here's what the insiders have been doing. You decide what to do with it.

The Daily Brief is the full nightly screen as a PDF, delivered each morning. Every ticker that passed the filters, sorted by margin of safety, with the reasoning attached. For people who want to run their own analysis but want the initial filter done.

Personal Finance and Investing Education covers the foundation most people never got — how to get out of debt, how to read a financial statement, what a DCF model is actually measuring, and why margin of safety matters before any of the other analysis does. No timeline. Start wherever you are.

The Philosophy

Value investing works because the logic is sound: buy a business at a price below what it's actually worth, and hold it until the market figures that out too. The hard part isn't understanding the concept — it's having a disciplined process that keeps you from making decisions based on noise.

The screener is that process, quantified. It doesn't have opinions. It doesn't have a thesis it's trying to confirm. It runs the same tests on every company, every night, and surfaces the ones that pass.

We don't tell you what to buy. We tell you what survived the filter and why.

The Pipeline

Each of the 1,500+ tickers in the screener runs through five models nightly:

• DCF Model — discounted cash flow valuation using normalized free cash flow. Tells you what the business is worth at a conservative estimate.
• Piotroski F-Score — a 9-point test of financial health covering profitability, leverage, and operating efficiency. A score of 8 or 9 is strong. Below 3 is a warning sign.
• Altman Z-Score — a bankruptcy risk filter. Companies in distress get removed from the value universe before any other analysis runs.
• Form 4 Parsing — real-time SEC filing analysis flagging meaningful insider purchases by executives and board members.
• Sharpe Optimizer — portfolio construction model targeting the best risk-adjusted return across the names that passed everything else.

The full methodology is on the Methodology page.

Disclosure

The Shallows is an independent research publication. No investment banking relationships. No sponsored content. No financial relationship with any company we write about. Everything published here is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Do your own due diligence.