Obsidere
● Free for everyone
How-To library

Learn the tools of the trade.

Plain-language guides to the ratios, platforms and methods we use — so you can check our work and do your own.

Basic ratios, explained

A ratio is just one number divided by another to make companies comparable. None of these is a verdict on its own — they're questions that point you toward better ones. Here are the ones worth knowing first.

P/E — Price to Earnings
Price ÷ Earnings per share

How many rupees you pay for one rupee of yearly profit. A P/E of 20 means you're paying ₹20 for ₹1 of annual earnings.

Read it as: higher = the market expects more growth (or it's expensive). Always compare to the company's own history and its peers, never in isolation.
P/B — Price to Book
Price ÷ Book value per share

Price against the company's net assets on the books. Useful for banks, NBFCs and asset-heavy businesses.

Read it as: below 1 can signal cheapness — or trouble. For lenders, pair it with ROE.
ROE — Return on Equity
Net profit ÷ Shareholder equity

How much profit the company makes on the money shareholders have put in. The single best gauge of quality for many businesses.

Read it as: consistently high (say 15%+) and not driven by excessive debt is a good sign.
ROCE — Return on Capital Employed
EBIT ÷ Capital employed

Return on all capital, debt and equity together. Strips out the financing choice to show operating quality.

Read it as: ROCE comfortably above the cost of capital means the business creates value as it grows.
D/E — Debt to Equity
Total debt ÷ Equity

How leveraged the company is. High debt magnifies both good and bad years.

Read it as: context matters — a utility can carry more than a software firm. For non-lenders, lower is generally safer.
Current ratio
Current assets ÷ Current liabilities

Whether the company can cover its short-term bills. A liquidity check.

Read it as: above 1 means short-term assets cover short-term dues; too high can mean idle cash.
Dividend yield
Dividend per share ÷ Price

The cash income you get as a % of the price, before any price change.

Read it as: attractive for income, but a very high yield can be a warning the market expects a cut.
EPS growth
Change in earnings per share

How fast per-share profit is growing. The engine behind long-run returns.

Read it as: steady, durable growth beats one big lumpy year. Check it's not just from one-off items.
The habit that matters most: never read a ratio alone. Compare it to the company's own past, to close peers, and ask why it's high or low. A cheap P/E on a declining business isn't a bargain.

Using screener.in

Screener.in is a free tool for looking up Indian companies' financials and filtering the whole market down to a shortlist. Here's how to actually use it — we assume you already have an account.

Looking up a single company

Search the company

Type the name in the search bar at the top. You'll land on its page.

Read the ratios panel

Near the top you'll see the key numbers at a glance — market cap, P/E, book value, ROCE, ROE, dividend yield. This is your quick health check.

Scroll the statements

Below are the quarterly results, profit & loss, balance sheet and cash flow, with 10-year history. Look for trends, not single years.

Check the growth tables

Screener shows compounded sales and profit growth over 10/5/3 years and TTM — a fast read on whether growth is speeding up or slowing.

Building a screen (a filter)

Open "Create new screen"

From the menu, choose to create a new screen. You'll get a query box.

Write simple conditions

Combine criteria in plain form, e.g. Market Capitalization > 500 AND Return on equity > 15 AND Debt to equity < 1. Each line narrows the list.

Run and sort

Run the query to get every company that matches, then sort by any column to rank them.

Save it

Save the screen so you can re-run it later as the market moves — your own repeatable shortlist.

How we use it at Obsidere: a screen never picks a stock for you — it just narrows thousands of companies to a handful worth real study. The work starts after the screen, not before.
Open screener.in ↗

Using Zerodha (Kite)

Kite is Zerodha's trading platform. This guide covers using it — placing trades, order types and the dashboard. (We don't cover opening an account here; the video below walks through the platform.)

Official walkthrough

⚑ Confirm/replace the embedded video — set ZERODHA_VIDEO_ID in the code to the official Zerodha video you want.

The essentials, in text

Log in to Kite

Use your User ID and password, then the 2FA app code. Kite works on web (kite.zerodha.com) and the mobile app.

Build your marketwatch

Add the stocks you follow to a watchlist so their live prices sit in front of you.

Place an order

Click Buy (B) or Sell (S) on a stock, set quantity and price, choose the product type, and submit.

Track positions & holdings

"Positions" shows intraday/open trades; "Holdings" shows shares you own for delivery in your demat.

Order types worth knowing

  • Market order — buys/sells immediately at the best available price. Fast, but the exact price isn't guaranteed.
  • Limit order — executes only at your set price or better. You control price, not timing.
  • CNC (Cash & Carry) — for delivery: shares go into your demat and you hold them. This is what long-term investors use.
  • MIS (Intraday) — for same-day trades that must be squared off before close. Higher risk; not for investing.
  • Stop-loss — triggers an order once a price is hit, to cap a loss.
For investors, not traders: if you're buying to hold based on our research, you'll almost always use a CNC order at a limit price. MIS and intraday tools are for short-term trading, which isn't what Obsidere is about.
Open Kite ↗

Using the Obsidere tools

Quick guides to the free tools on this site, so you know what each one is telling you.

The valuation models

The Valuation page lets you value a company three ways and blend them:

  • DCF projects a company's cash flows and discounts them to today. Use the bank/NBFC mode for lenders — it values net profit straight to equity, because the usual cash-flow approach doesn't fit financial companies.
  • Expected Returns projects profit out ten years, applies an exit P/E, and discounts the future value back — answering "what return does today's price imply?"
  • Weighted Blend combines the two with weights you choose, or an industry preset, into one intrinsic value vs. the current market cap.
Open the valuation tools →

The market signal

The Market Signal page reads the Nifty 50's P/E against the bond yield to place the market in a valuation band — deep value, low, mid or high — and cross-checks a Dow-Theory view of the weekly trend. Together they tell you whether a breakout is worth buying and whether a breakdown is worth selling.

Open the market signal →