What is the F score in finance?

Asked by: Wilford Bayer  |  Last update: August 15, 2026
Score: 4.6/5 (19 votes)

The Piotroski F-Score is a 9-point, integer-based scoring system used in fundamental analysis to evaluate a company's financial strength and identify high-quality value stocks. Developed by Professor Joseph Piotroski, it ranges from 0 to 9, where 7-9 indicates strong financial health, while 0-2 suggests a weak, potentially troubled business.

What is the F-score in financial analysis?

Piotroski F-Score is a number between 0-9 which is used to assess strength of company's financial position. The Score is used by financial investors in order to find the best value stocks (nine being the best). The Score is named after Stanford Accounting Professor, Joseph Piotroski.

What is the best F-score?

The highest possible Piotroski score is 9 and the lowest is 0. Higher the score better the value of the company's stock. F-score of 8–9 is considered to be strong. Alternatively, firms achieving the F-score of 0–2 are considered to be weak.

What is the meaning of F-score?

The F-score, also called the F1-score, is a measure of a model's accuracy on a dataset. It is used to evaluate binary classification systems, which classify examples into 'positive' or 'negative'.

Is a higher F-score always better?

A: Generally, a higher score indicates better financial strength. However, it's just one tool and should be used in conjunction with other financial analysis methods.

The Piotroski F-Score: A Tool for Value Investors

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What is a good F-score?

High F1 score: A high F1 score (generally above 0.7) indicates that the model has a good balance between precision and recall, meaning it can effectively identify positive cases while minimizing false positives and false negatives.

Is it better to have a high or low FICO score?

About FICO Scores

Most credit scores have a 300-850 score range. The higher the score, the lower the risk to lenders. A "good" credit score is considered to be in the 670-739 score range. This credit score is well below the average score of U.S. consumers and demonstrates to lenders that the borrower may be a risk.

What does the f value tell you?

The F critical value is a specific value from the F distribution that serves as a benchmark for determining statistical significance. If the calculated F value exceeds the critical value, we can reject the null hypothesis and conclude that the differences in group means are statistically significant.

What is a high F-score?

F-score interpretation:

A high F1-score indicates both high precision and high recall, meaning the model is good at identifying positive cases while minimizing false positives and false negatives. The F1-score ranges from 0 to 1, where 1 is the best score (perfect classification) and 0 is the worst.

How do you calculate the F-score?

F-score = 2 * (precision * recall) / (precision + recall)

What is a low F-score?

score applies additional weights, valuing one of precision or recall more than the other. The highest possible value of an F-score is 1.0, indicating perfect precision and recall, and the lowest possible value is 0, if the precision or the recall is zero.

What is a stock growth score of F?

The Piotroski F-Score is a simple tool that evaluates a company's financial health using nine criteria related to profitability, leverage, liquidity, and efficiency. Companies with a high F-Score (7-9) are financially strong, while those with a low F-Score (0-3) often signal trouble.

What are the three F's in finance?

Instead, it's better to assume your family and friends are prepared to finance you with money they might lose. Pointing this out will help you to avoid conflict at a later date. In this blog, we look at some of the pros and cons of starting a business with money from the 3Fs: family, friends and fools.

What is a bad F-score?

Introducing the F1 Score:

The F1 score ranges from 0 to 1, where 1 represents perfect precision and recall, and 0 indicates poor performance.

What is considered a big F value?

A high F-statistic means the variance between groups (or explained variance) is much larger than the variance within groups (or unexplained variance), suggesting a strong, significant effect or difference, causing you to likely reject the null hypothesis (that all group means are equal) and conclude the differences are real, not just random chance, indicated by a small p-value.
 

Is a higher F-score better?

In fields like healthcare and fraud detection, a high f1 score often means better real-world results. Precision and recall together help the f1 score account for both false positives and false negatives, making it a trusted metric in machine vision.

Do you want a high or low F value?

If you get a large f value (one that is bigger than the F critical value found in a table), it means something is significant, while a small p value means all your results are significant. The F statistic just compares the joint effect of all the variables together.

How do we know if an F-statistic is significant?

In most studies, a p-value of 0.05 or less is considered statistically significant — but you can set the threshold higher. A higher p-value of over 0.05 means variation is less likely, while a lower value below 0.05 suggests differences. You can calculate the difference using this formula: (1 - p-value)*100.

How do we calculate the F-statistic?

Because we want to compare the "average" variability between the groups to the "average" variability within the groups, we take the ratio of the Between Mean Sum of Squares to the Error Mean Sum of Squares. That is, the F-statistic is calculated as F = MSB/MSE.

Can I get a $50,000 loan with a 700 credit score?

Yes, you can likely get a $50,000 loan with a 700 credit score, as this falls into the "good" credit range (670-739) that unlocks better rates, but approval also hinges on your income, debt-to-income (DTI) ratio (ideally below 36%), and overall credit history, with lenders looking for stability and repayment ability, so prequalifying with multiple lenders helps compare terms.