The Buffett Quality Screen, First Edition: 1,790 Companies, Six Lenses, and the 16 That Survive Both of Our Boards

Two of these rows are honest confessions of the instrument's limits. Costco's pricing power reads 6 because the screen proxies pricing power with gross margin, and Costco's whole moat is refusing to raise prices — a low-cost franchise the margin lens structurally underrates. NVIDIA's stability reads 0 because hypergrowth maximizes revenue variance; the lens is answering the question it was asked ("does this company sell what it sold ten years ago?" — emphatically no), and the 2007-letter design accepts that cost. A screen with no imagination will misfile the exceptions; we prefer to document them rather than patch the arithmetic per name.

Crossing the two boards

Our Growth Board asks the opposite question — ten questions about where a business is going, scored 0–100, currently covering 1,013 companies. 523 companies now sit on both boards, and the first finding is how little the two lenses agree: average Growth Score rises only from 43.1 in the sub-50 Buffett band to 47.4 in the 90+ band, a four-point drift. Quality as Buffett defined it and growth as Baillie Gifford's questions probe it are close to orthogonal — which is precisely what makes the intersection valuable.

Set the bar at Buffett ≥ 85 and Growth Score ≥ 50, and exactly 16 companies in the world clear both:

The reverse quadrant is just as instructive. Among companies scoring 50+ on growth but under 50 on quality: Amazon at 44/62, Palantir at 46/61, MercadoLibre at 47/56, Shopify at 44/56, Sea at 34/55, Kuaishou at 32/51, Duolingo at 40/51. Their pathology is nearly identical — profit streaks of three to five years and an ROE history too short to score, which caps them structurally: this instrument pays only for the proven decade, and a company that turned profitable in 2023 cannot buy those points at any price. Amazon adds the classic Buffett objection on top: ten-year capex consumed 80% of operating cash flow, scoring zero on capital efficiency. The board passes no judgment on whether these are good businesses; it asserts only that, by this instrument's definition, they are unproven or expensive to run — Kuaishou, 32 here, is simultaneously the number-two conviction on our value-grievance list published on August 6. Two boards, two questions, two answers, and both can be right.

What this screen cannot see

The limits, stated plainly, because a quality list read carelessly becomes a buy list. The window is backward-looking: ten years of statements reward the proven and are silent on inflection. Pricing power is proxied by margins, which underrates low-cost moats (Costco above). Stability penalizes hypergrowth by construction (NVIDIA above). Banks and insurers are excluded by the gate, so Buffett's own famous financial holdings can never appear. Seven Tokyo listings lack filings data at our provider and go unscored. And the screen contains no valuation input whatsoever — ResMed at 99 says nothing about ResMed's price today. Quality and price are separate questions, and our valuation-position work exists precisely because they correlate so weakly.

The gap this board just exposed

The screen's most actionable output is negative space: of the 299 elite companies at 80+, 173 — 58% — have no research report in our library yet, with Check Point at 97 the highest-scoring orphan. In the strong band (65–79) the gap is 308 of 452. That list now feeds our research queue directly, and the queue is the commitment: future editions of this screen (it refreshes monthly with new filings) will report the elite coverage gap as a shrinking number, and readers can hold us to it.

The full interactive board is at /buffett — sortable by ROE, leverage, margin and market cap, filterable by score band, market, cap size and profit streak, with every company linked to its research report where one exists. Scoring standards live on the methodology page. Everything above is a quantified reading of ten years of reported financial statements as of 2026-08-05; scores measure the past, say nothing about future returns, and none of this is investment advice.