T. Rowe Price Jr.
Growth that survives a full cycle, funded by the business itself.
| Measure | Formula | Median | Middle half | Reporting it |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Positive earnings, ten years running | Needs ten years of filings | — | — | — |
| Operating margin | Operating income ÷ revenue | 15.0% | 6.0% – 24.7% | 516 |
| Return on capital employed | Operating income ÷ (equity + total debt) | 10.2% | 5.6% – 16.7% | 444 |
| Return on equity, sustained | Needs ten years of filings | — | — | — |
Where each comes from
| Positive earnings, ten years running | Graham's fourth defensive criterion, and the only one of his that needs a decade: some earnings in every one of the past ten years. A single loss year fails it. |
|---|---|
| Operating margin | He treated a high and defended profit margin as the evidence that growth came from a superior position rather than from a rising tide. |
| Return on capital employed | Growth financed out of returns on capital already deployed, rather than out of repeated issuance. |
| Return on equity, sustained | Akre's first leg is a high return on equity held over time rather than in one good year. He publishes no number, so this checks how many of the last ten years cleared the median of every company here — that reading is ours, not his. |
Source: Picking Growth Stocks, Barron’s 1939, and the growth-stock doctrine he built on it.
What this cannot tell you
His test was earnings reaching new highs at successive cycle peaks, which needs decades rather than the ten years held here. Read the streak as the nearest available approximation.
This page describes a published method and applies its measures to filings. It is not a score, not a ranking and not a recommendation, and no page here aggregates these into a verdict. · All 11 metrics