This is our short term rating system that serves as a timeliness indicator for stocks over the next 1 to 3 months. How good is it? See rankings and related performance below.

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The Style Scores are a complementary set of indicators to use alongside the Zacks Rank. It allows the user to better focus on the stocks that are the best fit for his or her personal trading style.

The scores are based on the trading styles of Value, Growth, and Momentum. There's also a VGM Score ('V' for Value, 'G' for Growth and 'M' for Momentum), which combines the weighted average of the individual style scores into one score.

Within each Score, stocks are graded into five groups: A, B, C, D and F. As you might remember from your school days, an A, is better than a B; a B is better than a C; a C is better than a D; and a D is better than an F.

As an investor, you want to buy stocks with the highest probability of success. That means you want to buy stocks with a Zacks Rank #1 or #2, Strong Buy or Buy, which also has a Score of an A or a B in your personal trading style.

Zacks Style Scores Education - Learn more about the Zacks Style Scores

The Zacks Industry Rank assigns a rating to each of the 265 X (Expanded) Industries based on their average Zacks Rank.

An industry with a larger percentage of Zacks Rank #1's and #2's will have a better average Zacks Rank than one with a larger percentage of Zacks Rank #4's and #5's.

The industry with the best average Zacks Rank would be considered the top industry (1 out of 265), which would place it in the top 1% of Zacks Ranked Industries. The industry with the worst average Zacks Rank (265 out of 265) would place in the bottom 1%.

Zacks Rank Education -- Learn more about the Zacks Rank
Zacks Industry Rank Education -- Learn more about the Zacks Industry Rank

The Zacks Sector Rank assigns a rating to each of the 16 Sectors based on their average Zacks Rank.

A sector with a larger percentage of Zacks Rank #1's and #2's will have a better average Zacks Rank than one with a larger percentage of Zacks Rank #4's and #5's.

Zacks Sector Rank Education - Learn more about the Zacks Sector Rank

The sector with the best average Zacks Rank would be considered the top sector (1 out of 16), which would place it in the top 1% of Zacks Ranked Sectors. The sector with the worst average Zacks Rank (16 out of 16) would place in the bottom 1%.

Zacks Rank Education -- Learn more about the Zacks Rank
Zacks Sector Rank Education -- Learn more about the Zacks Sector Rank

The Zacks Equity Research reports, or ZER for short, are our in-house, independently produced research reports.

The ever popular one-page Snapshot reports are generated for virtually every single Zacks Ranked stock. It's packed with all of the company's key stats and salient decision making information. Including the Zacks Rank, Zacks Industry Rank, Style Scores, the Price, Consensus & Surprise chart, graphical estimate analysis and how a stocks stacks up to its peers.

The detailed multi-page Analyst report does an even deeper dive on the company's vital statistics. In addition to all of the proprietary analysis in the Snapshot, the report also visually displays the four components of the Zacks Rank (Agreement, Magnitude, Upside and Surprise); provides a comprehensive overview of the company business drivers, complete with earnings and sales charts; a recap of their last earnings report; and a bulleted list of reasons to buy or sell the stock. It also includes an industry comparison table to see how your stock compares to its expanded industry, and the S&P 500.

Researching stocks has never been so easy or insightful as with the ZER Analyst and Snapshot reports.

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Zacks Earnings ESP (Expected Surprise Prediction) looks to find earnings surprises by focusing on the most recent analyst revisions. This is done because, generally speaking, if an analyst reevaluates their earnings estimate right before an earnings release, it means that they have fresh information which could potentially be more accurate than what analysts thought about a company two or three months ago.

The crux of this approach is comparing the Most Accurate Estimate to the Zacks Consensus Estimate, although the Zacks Rank is also an important feature of the ESP metric. Combining these two can help investors find stocks that are ready to beat the consensus at their next report, and hopefully surge higher in price too.

In fact, when combining a Zacks Rank #3 or better and a positive Earnings ESP, stocks produced a positive surprise 70% of the time. And best of all, by using these parameters, investors have seen 28.3% annual returns on average, according to our 10 year backtest.

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See the Full List of Stocks To Beat Earnings