Quality Compounder Screener

By Christian Richter | Last updated 2026-09-23

A quality compounder is a company that earns high returns on invested capital and reinvests those returns at similarly high rates, growing intrinsic value year after year. The investing tradition behind this idea runs through Charlie Munger, Joel Greenblatt, and Chuck Akre: find businesses with durable competitive advantages, hold them, and let compounding do the work. The challenge is separating genuine compounders from companies that happened to have one good quarter. Shibui checks each individual quarter, so you can screen for stocks where ROIC stayed above 15% for at least 6 of the last 8 quarters, not just where it is high today.

What the screener checks

Quality compounder criteria

There is no standardized "compounder score." The criteria below reflect what investors like Munger, Greenblatt, and Akre have described, mapped to what Shibui can check. You define the thresholds and Claude runs the screen.

Honest caveats: Shibui has no moat ratings, competitive advantage scores, or management quality assessments. ROIC and ROE are excluded (NULL) for companies with negative equity, which includes some successful compounders that bought back more shares than they earned (Starbucks, TransDigm). Gross margin is not meaningful for banks and insurance companies. These are quantitative screens, the qualitative judgment is yours.

Example screens

Claude checks each individual quarter's ROE and ROIC and counts how many pass the threshold. A stock that dipped below 20% ROE in one quarter out of eight still qualifies. This temporal consistency check is the core of quality compounder screening, and it is the type of condition that traditional screeners cannot run.

This is a stricter screen: no quarter can miss on either margin or growth. Claude checks 12 consecutive quarters and rejects any company where even one quarter had a margin dip below 15% or a year-over-year revenue decline. The result is a short list of companies with genuinely stable, growing businesses.

After screening the universe, the next step is comparing individual names. Claude pulls 20 quarters of ROIC, operating margin, and FCF data side by side and summarizes which company maintained the most consistent profile. For a deeper single-stock analysis, see the Munger quality screen guide.

How it compares to other quality screeners

Most screeners let you filter on current ROE or margin. Very few can check whether a metric stayed above a threshold for multiple quarters. None let you describe the screen in plain English.

Stock Rover is the closest competitor for quality screening, with ROIC data, custom equations, and scoring. The trade-off is that it uses preset averages (5-year ROIC average) rather than checking each quarter individually, and it does not support natural language queries. If you want pre-built quality rankings and portfolio integration, Stock Rover is the established tool. If you want to define your own consistency criteria, combine quality with Piotroski F-Score, earnings surprise data, insider buying data, or technical indicators, and study how the screen performed historically, Shibui handles that. See the AI stock screener overview for how Shibui compares on other screening approaches.

Want to run this screen daily on a schedule? See the automated stock screener workflow for scheduling commands and prompt reliability patterns.

Frequently asked questions

What is a quality compounder stock?

A quality compounder is a company that earns high returns on invested capital and reinvests those returns at similarly high rates, compounding intrinsic value over time. The key characteristics are consistent ROIC above 15%, stable or expanding operating margins, steady revenue growth, and conservative use of debt. The term comes from investors like Charlie Munger, Chuck Akre, and Joel Greenblatt, who prioritize business quality over price.

Is there a free quality compounder screener?

Shibui Finance is a free quality compounder screener. Connect it to Claude (the free plan works) and describe what you want: stocks with ROIC above 15% for at least 6 of the last 8 quarters, stable margins, and revenue growth. There is no subscription. The trade-off: no real-time data, no pre-built compounder rankings, and no automated alerts. You define the criteria yourself in plain English.

Can you screen for consistent ROIC over multiple quarters?

Yes. This is what separates Shibui from most screeners. Traditional screeners filter on the current quarter's ROIC. Shibui checks each individual quarter, so you can ask for stocks where ROIC stayed above 15% for at least 6 of the last 8 quarters. One bad quarter does not disqualify a company that was strong in every other period. Most screeners cannot run this type of temporal consistency check.

How does a quality compounder screen differ from a value screen?

A value screen looks for cheap stocks on current multiples: low P/E, below book value, high dividend yield. A quality compounder screen looks for stocks that may trade at a premium but earn high returns on capital. Many quality compounders trade at P/E ratios above 25. The thesis is that sustained high ROIC compounds intrinsic value faster than a cheap stock with low returns on capital. On Shibui, you can combine both: quality criteria with a valuation ceiling.

Can you backtest quality compounder criteria on Shibui?

Yes. Shibui has quarterly financial data going back 20 or more years for most companies. You can ask Claude to find stocks that met your quality criteria at any point in the past and check their subsequent returns over 1, 3, 6, or 12 months. This is a historical backtest, not a forward-looking simulation, and survivorship bias applies since delisted companies are not in the dataset.

Does Finviz have ROIC screening?

No. Finviz has ROE and ROA as screening filters but not ROIC. It also cannot check consistency over time: you can filter for ROE above 20% today, but not for ROE above 20% in at least 6 of the last 8 quarters. For ROIC-based screening with temporal consistency checks, Shibui or a paid platform like Stock Rover is needed.