Quarterly Earnings Watchlist

What we look for

• Q2 — DSO drifting up by ≥5 days each quarter for 3 quarters in a row — channel stuffing or paying-customer deterioration.
• Q3 — Gross margin YoY compression ≥500bp (red), ≥300bp (watch). Driven by input costs, tariffs, or pricing pressure.
• Q4 — Trailing four-quarter CFO / NI < 0.5 — earnings printing without cash to match, a classic accruals signal.
• Q5 — Inventory growing > 1.5× revenue growth, with revenue growth in 2%–40% (filtering out hyper-growth capacity build).

Banks, brokers, and insurers are skipped automatically (their balance-sheet semantics differ). Companies with quarterly revenue < $25M are also skipped — early-stage ratio noise dominates real signal.