ROA — return on assets

What it measures¶

ROA is the year's net income divided by the company's total assets — everything it owns. The Fundamentals page divides by the average of the assets at the start and the end of the year. ROA answers: how much profit did each unit of what the company owns produce? Unlike ROE, it is not inflated by debt, because assets include everything bought with borrowed money.

Why it is on the page¶

It is the simplest measure of how productive a company's assets are. Its sign — positive or negative — is the first check of the condition summary (ROA positive), and its change is another (ROA improving). Those checks divide by the assets at the start of the year, as Piotroski did, so their figure differs slightly from this row's.

Thresholds, their source and the population they were fitted on¶

The row's bar has two zones split at zero:

• Source: the sign line of Piotroski's ROA check (Piotroski 2000).
• Fitted on: US companies whose shares were priced low against the equity on their balance sheet, fiscal years 1976–1996.
• Evidence grade: peer-reviewed and replicated.

Above zero the bar draws no further zones: what counts as a good ROA differs greatly between asset-heavy industries (utilities, railways) and asset-light ones (software).

A worked example¶

Celestica, as the Fundamentals page showed it on 9 August 2026 (fiscal year 2025): ROA 12.61% — in the positive zone. Honeywell International's ROA for the same year, as the condition summary computed it on assets at the start of the year, was 6.3%.

What “No verdict” means here¶

The row carries no verdict of its own; the panel's header shows the verdict of its area. It reads insufficient data — requires the prior period for the oldest stored year, which has no opening assets to average.

What the verdict is and is not¶

The figure describes one year's profit against what the company owns. It is not a ranking against other companies, not a forecast, and not an instruction to trade the shares.