We have some new data to update our GARP or “Growth At A Reasonable Price” Screener.
I will be updating this periodically as new names appear and new earnings data adds or removes names from this list.
There is a scene in Michael Lewis's The Big Short where Michael Burry's team is trying to explain to a Goldman Sachs bond trader why they want to buy insurance against mortgage-backed securities. The trader laughs. Of course he laughs. The conventional wisdom in 2005 was that housing never falls nationwide. Burry was not smarter than the trader. He was simply willing to read the data without filtering it through what everyone already believed.
GARP investing requires a similar willingness to look at what the numbers actually say, not what a comfortable narrative suggests.
Today, the comfortable narrative is that the S&P 500 is the only place serious money belongs - that emerging markets are too risky, that small caps are too volatile, that anything outside the Magnificent Seven is a distraction.
The truth is that a 10x P/E on a company growing earnings at 27% is a gift.
And there are several of those on this list right now.
Below is a writeup of every stock that passed our GARP composite screen as a Strong Buy, as of today.
These are scored on PEG (25 points), ROE (15 points), ROCE (15 points), EPS growth year-over-year (15 points), five-year EPS CAGR (15 points), debt-to-equity (10 points), and FCF positive (5 points).
We ran the screen this morning. The market conditions from today - including a possible Iran ceasefire, WTI crude down 9%, S&P 500 up 1.7% - are factored into the commentary where relevant.
GARP Names by Sector
Strong Buy - Score 80 or better : Exceptional GARP Opportunities
Fifteen stocks cleared the 80-point threshold. These are the names where the earnings growth rate is most dramatically disconnected from the valuation being paid.
HRMY STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 97 · PEG: 0.37 · Fwd P/E: 10x · EPS Growth: +27.1% · ROE: 28.5%
Harmony Biosciences Holdings · NASDAQ · Market cap: ~$1.8B · Price: ~$33
WAKIX is the only non-scheduled FDA-approved treatment for excessive daytime sleepiness and cataplexy in narcolepsy patients. Full-year 2025 revenue came in at $868.5 million, up 22% from 2024, marking six consecutive years of revenue growth.
The company has reaffirmed 2026 guidance of $1.0 to $1.04 billion - which is blockbuster status, achieved with a single product.
The PEG ratio of 0.37 is the lowest in our entire screen.
At 10x forward earnings with 27% EPS growth, the market is essentially pricing in that the franchise stops here. It won't. Six of seven ANDA generic filers have settled litigation, with generic entry blocked until at least March 2030.
The analyst consensus price target sits at $46, with a high estimate of $62. You are buying at $33.
The one risk worth watching: the seventh ANDA filer has not settled. A court ruling against Harmony accelerates the generic threat timeline. It is worth monitoring. It is not worth exiting a 0.37 PEG monopoly drug for.
QFIN STRONG BUY ★★★ ⚑BUT VERIFY Score: 97 · PEG: 0.19 · Fwd P/E: 2.4x · EPS Growth: +22% · ROE: 28.5%
Qfin Holdings Inc. · NASDAQ ADR · Market cap: ~$1.1B · Price: $13.21 (Mar 18)
QFIN earns the highest raw score in the screener by a significant margin with a PEG of 0.19 is among the lowest I have seen on any profitable company in my entire career of equity research.
But a stock that drops 51% in a matter of weeks demands explanation before action. Here is the honest read on what happened: Qfin (formerly Qifu Technology) reported Q4 and full-year 2025 results on March 17, generating record operating cash flow of RMB 11.1 billion and net income of RMB 5.975 billion.
The headline numbers were strong. Management's commentary was not. The earnings call flagged rising portfolio risk, tightened credit standards, and declining loan volumes on the capital-heavy book.
This is a Chinese consumer credit platform operating in a regulatory environment that can shift materially with no warning. The score reflects the underlying financials.
The flag reflects the risk premium required to own it. A 0.19 PEG is extraordinary - it is also useless if the credit cycle deteriorates and earnings guidance gets cut by 40%.
The right approach is deep due diligence on the Q4 earnings transcript, the loan portfolio quality metrics, and the regulatory posture in Beijing before sizing into any position. Do not act on the score alone.
This is the most important caveat in this entire writeup.
META STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 88 · PEG: 0.79 · Fwd P/E: 22x · EPS Growth: +28% · ROE: 35.2%
Meta Platforms Inc. · NASDAQ · Market cap: ~$1.53T · Price: ~$594 (March 23)
Meta has pulled back roughly 20% from its January 2026 high of $796, driven by investor anxiety over $115–135 billion in 2026 capital expenditure guidance.
The anxiety is understandable. The concern is misplaced.
Q4 2025 revenue came in at $59.89 billion, up 24% year-over-year, with EPS of $8.88 against an $8.21 consensus - which is an incredible 8.1% beat.
The capex is not being spent recklessly; most of the spend is towards AI infrastructure that Meta's ad targeting and recommendation systems need to maintain competitive advantage.
At 22x forward earnings with 28% EPS growth, the PEG of 0.79 is compelling for a company of this scale. The Llama open-source ecosystem is creating a platform dynamic that reduces Meta's dependency on proprietary model development costs while building developer lock-in.
The ad platform is the most efficient large-scale customer acquisition engine ever built.
Earnings date is April 29. The setup heading into that print, with the stock having already corrected 20%, is favorable.
VLO STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 87 · PEG: 0.84 · Fwd P/E: 13.5x · EPS Growth: +25% · ROE: 24.5%
Valero Energy Corporation · NYSE · Market cap: ~$55B · Price: ~$239 (March 23)
The conventional wisdom says that oil falling 9% today is bad for energy stocks. Valero is not an oil company.
Valero is a refiner — and for refiners, the relationship between crude prices and earnings is more nuanced. Refining margin (the crack spread) is the difference between the price of crude and the price of finished products like gasoline and diesel.
When crude falls faster than product prices adjust, crack spreads can actually widen. Today's 9% move in WTI is worth monitoring for that dynamic over the next several sessions. Goldman Sachs named VLO a top oil stock with a $237 price target, citing Gulf Coast positioning and a projected 161.8% year-over-year EPS increase in Q1 2026.
At 13.5x forward earnings with 25% EPS growth and a PEG of 0.84, Valero is the cheapest large-cap energy company in our screen on GARP math.
The dividend provides a 2% floor. The FCF yield of approximately 9.5% is higher than almost every quality company on this list.
Own it and size it knowing that the energy sector is directly exposed to whatever the Iran situation resolves to over the next several weeks.
MU STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 85 · PEG: 0.49 · Fwd P/E: 14x · EPS Growth: +28.5% · ROE: 18.5%
Micron Technology Inc. · NASDAQ · Market cap: ~$128B · Price: ~$408 (March 23)
Micron is the purest AI memory play in public markets.
High-bandwidth memory (HBM) is the bottleneck in AI chip performance - Nvidia's H100 and H200 GPUs require HBM3 and HBM3E stacks that only Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix produce at scale.
Of those three, Micron is the only US-headquartered manufacturer, which gives it structural advantage in domestic procurement decisions for AI data centers.
At 14x forward earnings with 28.5% EPS growth, the PEG of 0.49 reflects a market that is treating Micron like a commodity memory cyclical rather than a structural AI infrastructure beneficiary.
The bear case is supply.
Memory is historically the most volatile semiconductor market. When prices collapse, they collapse fast and far.
The bull case is that HBM is a fundamentally different product from commodity DRAM: it requires different fab processes, yields are lower, and switching costs are higher.
The AI data center build is the permanent replatforming of computing infrastructure. Micron's position in that situation is structurally protected in ways that commodity DRAM was not.
GOOGL STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 85 · PEG: 0.88 · Fwd P/E: 20x · EPS Growth: +23.5% · ROE: 27.8%
Alphabet Inc. · NASDAQ · Market cap: ~$2.1T · Price: ~$171 (March 23)
Alphabet is the most underrated GARP position in mega-cap technology.
At 20x forward earnings with 23.5% EPS growth, the PEG of 0.88 is the cheapest among the Magnificent Seven by a meaningful margin.
The market continues to price Alphabet as a search company under existential threat from AI. The reality is that Alphabet is an AI company. We need to take into account that Gemini, DeepMind, and Google Cloud together represent a research and infrastructure capability that is competitive with any organization in the world.
Google Cloud grew at 30% year-over-year last quarter and is now the fastest-growing of the three major cloud hyperscalers. YouTube's advertising business generates more revenue annually than Netflix.
The 0.07 debt-to-equity ratio means the balance sheet is essentially clean. And the Search business, which everyone has been declaring dead for two years, continues to generate $50+ billion in annual operating income.
The AI search integration through Gemini is a feature upgrade. It makes the product better and the competitive moat deeper.
EAT STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 84 · PEG: 0.58 · Fwd P/E: 14x · EPS Growth: +25% · ROE: 145%
Brinker International Inc. · NYSE · Market cap: ~$5.2B · Price: ~$116 (March 23)
Brinker is the Chili's story.
Three years ago, Chili's was a declining casual dining chain losing market share to fast casual. The new management team made a simple decision to stop trying to be everything to everyone and own the value positioning explicitly.
They cut the menu from 100+ items to fewer than 60, reduced food costs, improved throughput, and marketed aggressively to the consumer who is trading down from full-service restaurants but trading up from fast food.
The result is a traffic inflection that has driven 25% EPS growth at a forward P/E of 14x.
The ROE of 145% looks alarming until you understand it reflects the negative book value that comes from decades of franchise buybacks which should not be viewed as a sign of imminent financial distress, but of capital efficiency. The debt is manageable and the free cash flow is real.
Today's oil decline is a direct input cost benefit for a company that runs delivery fleets and heats 1,200 restaurants.
This is a classic underfollowed turnaround trading at a price that assumes the turnaround fails. I think it succeeds.
ONTO STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 84 · PEG: 0.82 · Fwd P/E: 22x · EPS Growth: +22% · ROE: 22.5%
Onto Innovation Inc. · NASDAQ · Market cap: ~$4.8B · Price: ~$148 (March 23)
Onto Innovation is the kind of company that makes equity research genuinely interesting.
ONTO is a $4.8 billion market cap business providing process control and inspection equipment that is indispensable for advanced semiconductor packaging.
Every chipmaker moving to 3D chip stacking, chiplets, and fan-out wafer-level packaging needs Onto's optical metrology systems. Advanced packaging is the fastest-growing segment of the semiconductor equipment market because it allows performance improvements without the yield challenges of shrinking node geometries.
At 22x forward P/E with 22% EPS growth, the PEG of 0.82 reflects the market treating Onto as a niche equipment company rather than a structural AI infrastructure beneficiary.
The FCF yield of 5.5% and the clean balance sheet (D/E 0.15) mean the company can self-fund growth without diluting shareholders.
Onto is the type of company Peter Lynch called a "ten-bagger in the making" - because it is essential and underfollowed.
CF STRONG BUY ★★★ ⚑ MONITOR AND VERIFY Score: 83 · PEG: 0.37 · Fwd P/E: 9x · EPS Growth: +25% · ROE: 32.5%
CF Industries Holdings Inc. · NYSE · Market cap: ~$15B · Price: ~$117 (March 23, down from $136 on March 12)
CF Industries requires honest accounting of what changed today.
When we ran the March 12 screener, CF had just surged 13.2% in a single session because the Iran conflict was disrupting Russian natural gas flows and elevating nitrogen fertilizer prices globally.
At a forward P/E of 9x with 25% EPS growth, the PEG of 0.37 was one of the most compelling in the entire screen.
Today, Mizuho downgraded CF to Neutral with a $100 price target, arguing the nitrogen pricing surge is temporary and will reverse once the Middle East conflict de-escalates. The Iran ceasefire announcement this morning sent CF down 7.4% to $117 - still a meaningful decline from its recent high of $137.
The underlying GARP math still works at $117 if the earnings forecast holds. CF's business model is structurally sound.
The US is the lowest-cost nitrogen producer in the world given cheap natural gas feedstock, and global agricultural demand is not discretionary. But Mizuho's analysis is worth taking seriously.
The consensus price target has dropped to $101, which is below today's price. This is a hold if you own it, not an add at current levels.
Wait for clarity on whether the ceasefire holds and what happens to nitrogen pricing in the subsequent weeks.
RCL STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 82 · PEG: 0.37 · Fwd P/E: 11x · EPS Growth: +29.9% · ROE: 28.5%
Royal Caribbean Group · NYSE · Market cap: ~$50B · Price: ~$190 (March 23)
Royal Caribbean shares a PEG of 0.37 with Harmony Biosciences - the same extraordinary cheapness, a completely different business.
At 11x forward earnings with 29.9% long-term earnings growth, the market is not pricing in the obvious: cruising is structurally growing.
Passenger volumes have hit all-time highs. Pricing power has proven more durable than any analyst predicted in 2020. The Royal Beach Club expansion in Nassau opens a new high-margin private destination model that the rest of the industry cannot quickly replicate.
Today's oil decline is a direct tailwind.
Royal Caribbean's fuel costs represent roughly 8-10% of total operating expenses, so every $10 drop in crude oil improves annualized earnings by approximately $150-200 million.
The D/E of 1.85 is elevated because the industry never fully deleveraged from COVID. But with 30% EPS growth and 6.5% FCF yield, the balance sheet is improving faster than the market is crediting.
Own it.
VRTX STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 81 · PEG: 1.12 · Fwd P/E: 28x · EPS Growth: +25% · ROE: 22.8%
Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. · NASDAQ · Market cap: ~$120B · Price: ~$460 (March 23)
Vertex has the most defensible monopoly in pharmaceutical markets.
It holds the only approved treatments for cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease with no cure and no alternatives to CFTR modulators. The CF franchise generates approximately $10 billion annually in revenue with mid-40% operating margins.
At 28x forward earnings with 25% growth, the PEG of 1.12 is the highest in the Strong Buy tier - and worth every point of it.
The next growth leg is non-opioid pain management.
Vertex's suzetrigine received FDA approval and is the first new class of pain medicine in decades - a non-addictive sodium channel blocker that works peripherally rather than centrally.
If it captures even 5-10% of the opioid prescribing market, the revenue impact is larger than the CF franchise. The Type 1 diabetes program, a functional cure approach using stem cell therapy, is the decade-long option embedded in the stock.
Zero debt. Pure cash generation. Own it as a core healthcare position.
CRS STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 81 · PEG: 0.78 · Fwd P/E: 18x · EPS Growth: +23% · ROE: 22.5%
Carpenter Technology Corporation · NYSE · Market cap: ~$4.5B · Price: ~$175 (March 23)
Carpenter Technology makes specialty alloys that go into jet engines, medical devices, and defense systems. This is a precision materials manufacturer with customers who have no viable substitute.
Aerospace is in the middle of a multi-year production ramp.
Boeing and Airbus have order backlogs extending into the 2030s, and both require Carpenter's nickel superalloys for turbine blades and titanium alloys for structural components that cannot be sourced elsewhere at scale.
At 18x forward earnings with 23% EPS growth and a PEG of 0.78, Carpenter is the type of company that institutional investors discover after it has already run 50%.
It has not run yet.
The market continues to price it like a commodity steel company rather than a specialty materials supplier.
The defense spending cycle is a tailwind. The aerospace production ramp is a structural tailwind. The supply constraints on specialty alloys are unlikely to resolve for several years.
This is one of the best risk-adjusted setups in the industrial sector.
UNH STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 80 · PEG: 0.95 · Fwd P/E: 20x · EPS Growth: +21% · ROE: 29.2%
UnitedHealth Group Inc. · NYSE · Market cap: ~$498B · Price: ~$550 (March 23)
UnitedHealth is one of the few companies in the S&P 500 where the business model improves structurally every year.
Optum - UNH's health services arm encompassing pharmacy benefits management, physician practices, and analytics - is growing faster than the core insurance business and carries higher margins.
The vertical integration creates a flywheel.
At 20x forward earnings with 21% EPS growth, the PEG of 0.95 suggests the market has not fully priced in how durable that flywheel is.
The primary risk is regulatory.
A government that decides to intervene in managed care economics could impair the business model meaningfully. That risk is worth understanding and sizing accordingly.
But UNH has navigated four administrations with different healthcare philosophies without losing a single year of earnings growth.
ABBV STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 80 · PEG: 0.62 · Fwd P/E: 14x · EPS Growth: +22.5% · ROE: 72.5%
AbbVie Inc. · NYSE · Market cap: ~$325B · Price: ~$180 (March 23)
The Humira patent cliff was supposed to be AbbVie's undoing.
Everyone said so.
Skyrizi and Rinvoq, AbbVie's next-generation immunology drugs, are growing so fast that they have not merely replaced Humira's revenue, they are on track to exceed it.
Skyrizi is now approved in plaque psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, Crohn's disease, and ulcerative colitis. Rinvoq continues to expand across rheumatoid arthritis and inflammatory bowel disease. Combined peak revenue potential for the two drugs is estimated at $25 billion annually.
At 14x forward earnings with 22.5% growth and a PEG of 0.62, AbbVie is one of the most underappreciated large-cap compounders in the market.
The ROE of 72.5% reflects the structural capital efficiency of the pharma royalty model.
The neurology pipeline - including assets in schizophrenia and Alzheimer's - is the next decade's earnings driver. The 5.8% FCF yield funds a 3.5% dividend and ongoing buybacks. This is exactly what a GARP compounder looks like at full cruising speed.
BURL STRONG BUY ★★★ Score: 80 · PEG: 0.88 · Fwd P/E: 22x · EPS Growth: +25% · ROE: 28.5%
Burlington Stores Inc. · NYSE · Market cap: ~$22B · Price: ~$318 (March 23)
Burlington is the off-price retail story that is not TJX.
Every analyst conversation defaults to TJX when the topic is off-price retail, and Burlington consistently gets treated as the smaller, less interesting alternative.
The data does not support that framing. Burlington's comparable store sales and gross margin trajectory over the past three years have been as strong as any major retailer in the country, driven by a merchandising pivot toward national brands and a store fleet expansion that is still materially earlier in its growth curve than TJX's.
The GARP case is clean.
22x forward earnings, 25% EPS growth, PEG 0.88. Today's broader market risk-on move and oil decline are both tailwinds - consumer spending capacity improves when energy costs fall, and the consumer who is trading down into off-price channels is exactly Burlington's target customer.
The 0.62 D/E is the one item to monitor, but the balance sheet is manageable relative to the cash generation.
Core consumer position.
The Principle
Michael Burry did not predict the housing crash. He read the mortgage data carefully and concluded that the market was pricing housing risk as if it could not decline nationally. He was willing to be wrong for years before he was right. The position cost him clients, capital, and patience before it paid off.
GARP investing asks for a version of that same discipline. Not the dramatic contrarianism of shorting an entire asset class, but the quieter discipline of buying a narcolepsy monopoly at 10x earnings, a Brazilian pulp producer at 7.5x earnings, or a Korean AI memory manufacturer at 10x earnings - when the comfortable thing would be to buy the S&P 500 at 21x and call it a day.
The stocks in the Strong Buy tier of this screener are not popular.
They are not in the headlines.
Several of them are in sectors that feel uncomfortable right now - fertilizers, specialty metals, cruise lines.
That discomfort is often what creates the gap between price and value that GARP investors live to find.
The Earnout Investor provides analysis and research but DOES NOT provide individual financial advice. Jamie Dejter may have a position in some of the stocks mentioned. All content is for informational purposes only. The Earnout Investor is not a registered investment, legal, or tax advisor, or a broker/dealer. Trading any asset involves risk and could result in significant capital losses. Please, do your own research before acquiring stocks.