Subject: Re: Rankings for 1Dec2025
It's true that MI screens do not typically lend themselves to retirement portfolios.
As the obviously biased author, I think LargeCapCash might come close?

It's an equally weighted portfolio of 40 companies all of which are large cap, high returns on equity, dividend paying (the variant I used), and large piles of cash on hand. When created the goal was "something a lot like an index tracker, but with smaller company-specific risk and at least a reasonable expectation of beating the market by a couple of percent over time". It has done pretty well since it was created, though of course beating the S&P 500 in the last couple of years has been very difficult for anyone without high weightings to a few specific well known firms. It's a screen that leans sufficiently towards the prudent and diversified that it's pretty hard to see how it could blow up, and one could probably put a lot of money into it. It will of course do very badly from time to time (like any strategy) since it tracks the index pretty closely over the short term. It beat the S&P by around 2-4%/year in the first four years after publication, 2021-2024. Maybe a bit of luck in that, maybe not. It seems very unlikely to wipe you out.

The "pretty traditional" version would go something like this

* Start with Value Line set of ~1700 firms they cover
* Eliminate those not paying a dividend, and eliminate those without a valid "Timeliness" rank. The latter check tends to eliminated newly listed firms and those in the middle of transformative M&A.
* Of the remainder, take the top 30% of them ranked by "Shareholders Return on Equity" (a field they calculate only annually)
* For each firm in that high ROE set, calculate the amount of cash they have, minus the amount of long term debt. Not expressed as percent of market cap, just the absolute number. Find the 40 stocks with the highest cash-above-debt pile.
* Buy equal dollar a mounts of those 40.
* Hold two months. Re-run the screen. Sell any stocks you currently own that are no longer ranked in the top 45, and replace them with the highest ranked ones you don't already own.
* Rebalance all positions to equal weight once a year. Or more often if you like, it doesn't make a huge difference.

Since the data fields it uses don't change quickly, the turnover is quite low. Many stocks get held for over a year, which affects the tax for some people.

Jim