What if you could boil down everything about a stock — its competitive strength, its risks, and whether the price is right — into a single number? That's exactly what Mini Score does. It's a composite rating from 0 to 100 that answers the timeless question every value investor asks: Is this a good company at a good price?
Most tools force you to bounce between financial data, analyst ratings, and your own valuation models. Mini Score brings it all together in one glance. Let's break down how it works.
What Is Mini Score?
Mini Score is a 0 to 100 composite rating that combines two dimensions of stock analysis:
- Moat Score — How strong is this company's competitive advantage? (Powered by AI analysis)
- Valuation Score — How attractive is the current price based on your own DCF or PE ratio valuation?
The higher the score, the more the stock looks like a great deal. Here's how to read it:
| Score | Rating | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| 80–100 | Excellent | Strong moat + meaningfully undervalued |
| 60–79 | Good | Solid company at a reasonable price |
| 40–59 | Fair | Mixed signals — dig deeper |
| 20–39 | Caution | Weak fundamentals or overvalued |
| 0–19 | Poor | Significant concerns on both fronts |
For example, a stock like AAPL with a Moat Score of 80 and a Margin of Safety of 20% would earn a Mini Score of 76 (Good) — a strong business trading at a decent discount.
How Mini Score Works: 3 Steps
Step 1: AI Analyzes the Moat
When you run a valuation on MiniValuator, our AI automatically analyzes the company's competitive advantages and risks. It examines things like brand strength, switching costs, network effects, and regulatory moats — then assigns a Moat Score from 1 to 10.
You can see the full AI analysis on each stock's analysis page, which breaks down three specific moat advantages and three key risk factors.
This score gets normalized to a 0–100 scale (a Moat Score of 8/10 becomes 80/100).
Step 2: Your Valuation Becomes a Score
The Valuation Score comes directly from your own work. When you run a DCF valuation or PE ratio analysis, you get a Margin of Safety — the gap between what you think the stock is worth and what the market charges.
We convert that into a 0–100 score:
- MoS of +50% → Valuation Score of 100 (deeply undervalued)
- MoS of 0% → Valuation Score of 50 (fairly priced)
- MoS of -50% → Valuation Score of 0 (significantly overvalued)
This means the Valuation Score reflects your analysis, not some black-box algorithm. Change your growth rate assumptions or discount rate, and the score updates instantly.
Step 3: The Formula
Mini Score combines both dimensions with a clear weighting:
Mini Score = Moat Score × 60% + Valuation Score × 40%
Why 60/40? Because in value investing, company quality matters more than price. A wonderful business at a fair price beats a mediocre business at a bargain — Warren Buffett has said as much for decades.
But there's one more twist.
The Quality Gate: Why Cheap Doesn't Mean Good
Here's where Mini Score gets opinionated. If a company's Moat Score falls below 40 (out of 100), we cap the overall Mini Score — no matter how cheap the stock is.
Why? Because the history of investing is littered with "value traps": stocks that look cheap but stay cheap (or get cheaper) because the business is fundamentally deteriorating. A steel company trading at 3× earnings might seem like a steal, until you realize the industry is in structural decline with no competitive moat to protect margins.
The quality gate ensures Mini Score never tells you a bad company is a good investment just because it's on sale. It enforces the correct order of operations in value investing:
- First, find a good company
- Then, check the price
Why We Built Mini Score: The Philosophy
Most stock scoring systems are black boxes. Morningstar gives you 1–5 stars. TipRanks shows a Smart Score from 1–10. GuruFocus has its GF Score. They're useful, but you can't see the gears turning.
Mini Score is deliberately transparent. The formula is public. The weights are fixed. The Moat Score comes from AI analysis you can read in full. The Valuation Score comes from your own assumptions — not ours.
This matters because investing is personal. Your discount rate, your growth assumptions, your risk tolerance — these are choices that should be yours. Mini Score respects that by making the valuation half of the equation entirely user-driven.
We also wanted to capture something that pure quantitative models miss: qualitative competitive analysis. Numbers tell you where a company has been; moat analysis tells you whether it can stay there. By combining AI-powered qualitative analysis with your quantitative valuation, Mini Score bridges a gap that most stock valuation tools leave open.
"It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." — Warren Buffett
Mini Score vs. Other Rating Systems
| Feature | Mini Score | Morningstar Stars | TipRanks Smart Score | GuruFocus GF Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Score range | 0–100 | 1–5 stars | 1–10 | 0–100 |
| Formula transparent | ✅ Yes | ❌ Proprietary | ❌ Proprietary | Partially |
| User-driven valuation | ✅ Your assumptions | Their fair value | No valuation component | Their metrics |
| AI moat analysis | ✅ Readable analysis | Analyst notes (paid) | No moat component | No moat component |
| Free | ✅ | Limited | Limited | Limited |
The key difference: you control half the score. If you disagree with the market's growth rate assumptions or think the exit multiple should be different, your Mini Score reflects that immediately.
Try It Yourself
Ready to see your first Mini Score? Head to the stock valuation calculator, search for any US stock, and you'll see the score appear automatically after your valuation completes.
Want to understand the moat analysis behind the score? Click on the Mini Score badge to view the full AI Moat & Risk Analysis breakdown.
New to stock valuation? Start with our DCF calculator beginner's guide or explore how to calculate intrinsic value step by step.
Mini Score is designed as an analytical tool to help organize your investment research — not as financial advice. Always do your own due diligence before making investment decisions.
