How the Moat Score is built.
A Moat Score is a 0–100 estimate of how much control a public company has over a critical, hard-to-replace link in its supply chain. It weights five dimensions and grounds two of them in live market data. Everything else is model-generated reasoning against a fixed rubric.
The five dimensions
How few credible competitors can do this at scale — measured by real named peers, not category size.
How disruptive it would be for a paying customer to move to the next option — retooling, requalification, contract lock-in.
How hard a new well-funded competitor would find it to replicate the position within roughly five years, across capital, IP, permits, and know-how.
How essential the output is to the downstream chain — what breaks if this company stops shipping tomorrow.
How far the story is from being widely recognized and priced in. This dimension is not free-form — see below.
How the Radar Score is computed
"Still Under the Radar" replaces AI opinion with three observable signals pulled from market data: the number of sell-side analysts covering the name, institutional ownership percentage, and news article volume over the last 30 days. Higher analyst count, heavier institutional ownership, and heavier news flow reduce the Radar Score. When any signal is unavailable, the field is labelledESTIMATEDso you know the model filled the gap.
What the AI does — and what it doesn't
The AI writes the one-sentence reasoning per dimension, names real competitors, and produces the plain-English summary and risk note. It never sees price, and it never writes a target or a recommendation. All prices, 52-week ranges, analyst targets, fundamentals, and valuation multiples come from a market-data feed and are attributed as third-party estimates on the results screen.
The overall score
The overall Moat Score is a holistic weighting of the five dimensions, tilted toward Concentration, Criticality, and Still Under the Radar. It is not a simple average and is intentionally conservative in the 70+ range — most real companies aren't monopolies.
The 7-day cache
Each plain-ticker analysis is cached in the database for seven days. Repeat lookups return instantly and don't hit your free-tier daily allowance. Portfolio-Fit output, the Portfolio-Adjusted score, and Compare Candidates always run fresh because they depend on your holdings.
Portfolio Fit and the Portfolio-Adjusted score
When you save holdings, every lookup adds two descriptive notes — sector overlap and risk character — and a Portfolio-Adjusted score that shifts the standalone number ±15–25 points based on how much a new position would diversify or duplicate what you already own. It is composition analysis. It is never a position-size suggestion.
Moat Trajectory
The Moat Score measures the moat that exists today, which structurally under-scores smaller companies still building their position. Moat Trajectory is a separate reading of the direction the moat itself is moving over the next one to three years: building, stable, or eroding, with a 0–100 score where 100 is rapidly strengthening on hard evidence, 50 is stable, and 0 is actively eroding.
Evidence that counts is strictly business-structure: signed contracts or offtakes not yet in revenue, licenses or approvals granted but not yet monetized, capacity or facilities under construction, customer qualifications in progress, and awarded patents on the building side; new entrants scaling, expiring exclusivity, and customers diversifying away on the eroding side.
What Trajectory deliberately is not: a return forecast, a price target, a prediction the stock will rise or fall, or a signal to buy or sell. It describes the moat's direction only.
Limitations — read this
Portfolio Moat Profile
The Portfolio Moat Profile is a composition report on the holdings you have entered. Every number on that screen is arithmetic on your entered weights and existing Moat Scores — the Portfolio Moat Score is a weight-weighted average of each holding's cached overall score, Moat Quality Mix bins scored weight into 70+ / 40–69 / below 40, Theme Concentration groups holdings by supply-chain theme derived from their cached analyses, Single-Name Concentration reports the largest position and the top three combined, Discovery Profile is a weight-weighted average of the Radar dimension, and Trajectory Mix bins scored weight by Moat Trajectory direction.
If your entered weights don't sum to 100% we normalize them and say so. Holdings without a cached analysis are shown as unscored coverage — never as fabricated scores. What the profile deliberately is not: a recommendation to buy, sell, trim, add, rebalance, or hit any target weight; a return forecast; or a position-size suggestion.
Moat Scores are AI estimates against a rubric. They can be wrong, they can miss context you have, and they can lag reality when a moat erodes suddenly. The five dimensions describe business structure and competitive position — not entry price, not timing, not risk-adjusted return. This is a research and education tool. It is not investment advice, not a solicitation, and not a substitute for your own diligence or a licensed advisor.