The forward-looking score for Borsa İstanbul stocks

SmartSkor reflects a forward-looking projection of stocks' expected future performance — based on academic literature and tested against historical data.

Stocks trading below their intrinsic value receive high SmartSkor scores, and the goal is for investors to build a portfolio of high-SmartSkor stocks and profit over the long term. Stocks priced above their intrinsic value receive low SmartSkor scores, and investors are guided away from them.

SmartSkor scores are not a summary of past data.

The vast majority of individual investors earn returns that are inadequate relative to the risk they take. Behind this lies not just a gap in information access, but more importantly, the behavioral mistakes investors make. Chasing the news instead of setting and following an investment strategy, trying to ride stocks that have moved unusually sharply in the short term, or attempting to exploit sudden price movements — academic literature has shown repeatedly that such behaviors lead to long-term losses.

SmartSkor was built to prevent these mistakes. SmartSkor converts hundreds of variables, drawing on academic literature, into a single score for each stock on Borsa İstanbul. By giving investors an investment strategy they can follow over the long term, SmartSkor protects them from behavioral pitfalls. SmartSkor users follow an investment strategy grounded in academic research rather than predictions and snap reactions, and over the long term they earn returns above the market index.

SmartSkor is a forward-looking expectation score updated daily for every stock on Borsa İstanbul that has sufficient financial data. The score is designed to predict expected performance over the next one-month period, but it is recomputed daily with the latest market data. This makes SmartSkor a live signal that guides both daily monitoring and monthly portfolio decisions. At its core lies the systematic evaluation of hundreds of parameters derived from balance sheets, income statements, and cash flow statements. These parameters have been tested against 20 years of historical data specific to Borsa İstanbul, and the relationship of each one to future stock performance has been carefully examined.

Theme-Based Scoring

The parameters are grouped under six main themes. Each theme has its own score, computed so that investors can evaluate each stock across different dimensions:

Profitability

How efficiently does this company produce profit from its core operations? High score: high and sustainable profitability — the company generates strong returns on its capital. Low score: weak or volatile profitability — operational efficiency is low, and there is a risk of capital being wasted.

Value

How cheap is this company's market price relative to its fundamentals — book value, earnings, and cash flows? High score: cheap relative to fundamentals, potentially an opportunity. Low score: expensive relative to fundamentals.

Investment Discipline

How disciplined is this company in deploying its capital? High score: measured and disciplined investment — the company's asset base is growing under control, and capital is being used efficiently. Low score: aggressive capital expenditure, rapid asset growth, or heavy acquisitions — on average, such companies' future returns tend to disappoint.

Momentum

How strongly has this stock performed relative to the market in recent months? High score: the stock is outperforming the market — academic research shows that stocks outperforming the market over the last 6–12 months tend to continue this trend. Low score: the stock is underperforming the market, with momentum against it — this trend tends to persist for some time.

Fundamental Momentum

In which direction are the company's most recent quarterly balance-sheet metrics — profitability, growth, margins, efficiency — accelerating? High score: the company's fundamentals are strengthening, with a sustainable improving trend across key indicators. Low score: the fundamentals are weakening — these shifts in the balance sheet usually show up in the stock price with a delay.

Healthy Attention

How healthy is the market's attention on this stock? High score: attention is grounded in fundamentals, not speculative — the price is not inflated. Low score: the stock is speculative or in excessive attention — fashion, narrative, or crowd dynamics may have pushed the price ahead of its fundamentals.

For each theme, stocks are ranked by their expected future returns within that theme and divided into 10 groups. The group with the highest expected future returns receives a score of 10; the group with the lowest expected returns receives 1. Assuming roughly 600 companies trade on Borsa İstanbul, each group contains about 60 companies.

Composite Score

SmartSkor is a composite score produced by individually normalizing the dozens of characteristics organized under the six categories above, then combining them with equal weight. The calculation operates at the characteristic level rather than the category level — that is, all parameters across the six categories are evaluated together in a single pool, each carrying equal weight. There is no weighting tuned to outcomes, no data mining; every characteristic carries the same weight. This is a deliberate design choice on our part.

All BIST stocks are ranked by this composite score and divided into 10 equal groups. The top 10% receives 10; the bottom 10% receives 1. Each stock receives its final SmartSkor based on this ranking.

The individually computed scores for the six categories are displayed as components of SmartSkor; however, because each category contains multiple characteristics, the average of these six scores is not necessarily equal to the final SmartSkor.

Update Frequency

The parameters that form the score update at different frequencies. Some change with daily market data, some with weekly or monthly disclosures, and some when companies publish their quarterly and annual financial statements. As a result, the SmartSkor for every stock does not change at the same time; however, the latest data affects all rankings daily.

SmartSkor places a single task on the investor: asking the right question. "Which stocks are trading below their intrinsic value today?" SmartSkor answers this question for every company, every day. What remains is for the investor to decide how to use that information based on their own needs.

Step One: Start with Model Portfolios

The easiest way to use SmartSkor is to pick one of the ready-made model portfolios. SmartSkor 10 Top 10 and SmartSkor 10 Top 20 assemble the strongest names from the pool of high-expectation stocks into a disciplined basket that is easy to buy and hold. Alongside these, model portfolios built around industrials, services, Participation-Index compliance and industry themes are also available, suited to different investment preferences.

These portfolios are refreshed monthly. All the investor needs to do is review the portfolio composition at the start of the month and adjust their own holdings accordingly. No research burden, no parameter tracking — SmartSkor has already done the work.

Step Two: Build Your Own Portfolio with Weekly Monitoring

For the investor who wants to be slightly more active, SmartSkor offers a different mode of use. Here, the investor constructs their own portfolio — ideally a diversified basket of at least 5, and preferably 10 or more, stocks drawn from the SmartSkor 9 and 10 universe. The key principle is not to over-concentrate in any single name so that risk is properly spread.

Once the portfolio is built, a weekly check is enough. If one of the holdings has slipped meaningfully from a high score to a low score, the investor can swap it out for another high-scoring stock that fits the same investment theme. As long as the remaining holdings retain their scores, no action is required. As the behavioural finance literature consistently shows, frequent trading does not improve returns; on the contrary, it erodes them through transaction costs and timing errors.

Step Three: Daily Monitoring and Advanced Use

SmartSkor is updated every day, which opens up richer use cases for experienced investors. Industry-level scores provide an objective basis for deciding to invest in — or avoid — a particular sector. Investors building industrials-focused or Participation-Index-compliant portfolios can likewise define their own investment universes within this framework.

More experienced investors who follow the markets closely can also use industry-level SmartSkor movements as the starting point for derivative strategies. SmartSkor provides the entry point for this use case; the decision itself always belongs to the investor.

Ultimately, SmartSkor produces as much value as it is used to produce. An investor who starts with model portfolios can, over time, move to building their own portfolio and then to more active monitoring. At every level, SmartSkor does the same thing: it filters out the noise and brings expectation to the fore.

Investment Horizon

SmartSkor is designed to forecast expected performance over the next one-month horizon. That does not mean the portfolio needs to be overhauled every month. Continuing to hold a high-scoring stock for as long as it retains its score is both more rational and less costly. The real action signal is a meaningful decline in the score — so long as a score holds, patience is one of the most powerful investment decisions.

Trading Frequency

SmartSkor is updated daily, but that does not mean daily trading is required. For investors using a model portfolio, a monthly check is sufficient. For investors running their own portfolio, a weekly review is ideal. Daily monitoring should only be used to act on meaningful score changes. Frequent trading raises transaction costs and brings behavioural-error risk with it — precisely the kind of pitfall SmartSkor is designed to prevent.

Advanced Portfolio Management

For the experienced investor following the markets closely, SmartSkor takes stock selection off intuition and onto a systematic footing. Each of the six themes can be examined individually, making it possible to see not only the composite score but also the specific dimensions along which a company is strong or weak.

Industry-level score movements provide an objective basis for sector rotation decisions. If the average SmartSkor for a given industry is rising, it can signal that the underlying dynamics of that sector are moving in a favourable direction. A move in the opposite direction can serve as an early signal to rotate away from it. Experienced investors can also use these movements as the starting point for derivative strategies; pairing long and short positions around the expectation gap between SmartSkor universes is a concrete application of a factor-based approach.

For Fund Managers

Stock-selecting fund managers can use SmartSkor in two ways. First, as a way to evaluate the quality of the existing portfolio: by examining the SmartSkor of every holding, the fund's expected-return profile — strong or weak — can be measured objectively. Second, as a universe-narrowing tool: SmartSkor serves as a first-pass filter ahead of fundamental analysis, helping decide where to direct research capacity most efficiently among hundreds of stocks. High-scoring stocks are candidates worth examining in depth; low-scoring stocks should only be taken up with a strong rationale.

SmartFundSkor, in turn, offers fund managers the ability to evaluate competing funds. Seeing which funds carry a strong portfolio structure, which are quietly tracking the index, and how closely expense ratios match those expectations provides a valuable perspective on sector positioning.

Brokerages and Model Portfolio Integration

SmartSkor is both a client-service tool and a product-development backbone for brokerages. Brokerages that want to offer their clients a research-backed, transparent and up-to-date stock rating scale can integrate SmartSkor directly into their own platforms. They can also use the SmartSkor universe to build their own model portfolios — built around industrials, Participation, services or industry themes — and offer them to clients.

Data Providers and API Integration

API integration is available for data providers and technology platforms that want programmatic access to SmartSkor. Daily-updated score data, theme-level scores and historical score series can all be consumed through this channel. Technical integration support is provided for institutions wishing to embed SmartSkor into their own analytics infrastructure or investment platforms.