Also called Profile, Lifecycle stage

Classification

The company's sector, which sets the growth ceiling and terminal method, combined with its lifecycle stage read from its own cash-flow history. Re-derived every run, and you can override it.

Updated 2026-09-03

The lifecycle stage is Angie's classification of where a company sits right now: pre-profit, unprofitable, speculative, hypergrowth, growth, mature or declining. It is derived from data every time the sweep runs, never hand-assigned, so it cannot go stale.

What it decides

  • The projection method. A company with no positive cash flow gets margin convergence; everything else gets a direct cash-flow projection.
  • The growth ceiling. A classified hypergrowth name may project up to 45 percent in year one; everything else is capped at its sector's ceiling.
  • The horizon. Hypergrowth earns ten explicit years instead of five, because valuing a fast compounder over five amputates it.
  • The confidence. Hypergrowth, speculative and declining are all forced to low, whatever number comes out.

The classification reads three things: whether free cash flow is positive, how the company's own history is trending, and how richly it is priced against the cash it currently generates. A company priced above roughly 65 times its normalized cash flow is either a measured fast grower, in which case it is hypergrowth, or it is speculative, meaning the value rests on growth the model cannot verify.

A cyclical company can never earn the hypergrowth label, however fast its recent numbers look. A high short-window slope on a cyclical is a rebound from a trough, not a structural trajectory, and giving it a 45 percent ceiling and a ten-year runway would extrapolate the recovery forever.

See also

  • Growth rate — Year-one growth, faded toward the perpetual rate across the horizon. Left blank it comes from the company's own history, capped at the sector ceiling, and a genuine decline is kept rather than floored up.
  • Target FCF margin — For a company not yet generating cash, the steady-state margin it is assumed to reach. The most fragile assumption in the model, because nothing in the history supports it.
  • Terminal method — How value beyond the horizon is set: Gordon growth, which assumes cash flow grows forever at a fixed rate, or a multiple applied to the final year.
  • Valuation confidence — How far the model will stand behind its own answer. Low means free cash flow has been volatile, the price sits far above what the business generates, or a margin had to be guessed. It is not the strategy signal score.

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Educational content, not investment advice. Angie explains how a valuation is built so you can judge it yourself. What you do with that is your call.

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