About & Methodology

Bad Stock Killer is a free lookup tool that surfaces dilution and overhang risk signals for individual stocks — it does not recommend stocks to buy, and it never will. The goal is the opposite of a stock-picking site: warn readers about capital-raising and lockup patterns that are easy to miss reading headlines alone.

Data sources

• Nasdaq-listed companies: SEC EDGAR — company filings (S-1, S-3, 424B3/4/5, 8-K), XBRL financial facts (cash, share counts), and full-text search.
• KOSPI/KOSDAQ-listed companies: DART (Korea's Data Analysis, Retrieval and Transfer System) — not yet live on this site; planned.
• Price/volume data: Yahoo Finance, used only for a delayed reference chart and market cap estimate — not real-time.

What's tracked per stock

• Shelf registrations and offerings (S-1, S-3, 424B3/4/5) — classified as ATM, underwritten, direct offering, or shelf-registration-only where the filing text makes that determinable
• Cash on hand, quarterly cash burn, and an estimated cash runway in months
• Nasdaq listing-compliance notices (deficiency / regained), where an 8-K discloses one
• Stock split history (in progress)

How the risk score works

The 0–100 score is a transparent, additive formula computed from data already on the page — not a black box. Weights aren't arbitrary; each is grounded in something specific:

• Cash runway (up to 30 points) — shorter runway scores higher. The single strongest predictor of whether a company needs to raise capital soon.
• Offering frequency, trailing 12 months (up to 25 points) — recent capital raises score higher than old ones.
• Lifetime offering count (up to 15 points) — a long history of repeated raises scores higher.
• Estimated remaining shelf/ATM capacity vs. market cap (up to 15 points) — undrawn registered capacity that's large relative to the company's own size is an overhang risk even before it's used.
• Reverse stock split history (up to 10 points, weighted toward repeats) — 2025 saw a record 348 reverse splits industry-wide, almost always executed to avoid falling below an exchange's minimum bid price rather than for any operational reason. A company on its second or third reverse split is signaling an unresolved, worsening problem, not a one-off.
• China-domiciled issuer (up to 5 points) — specifically because the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act creates a US-listing-specific audit-inspection risk that doesn't apply the same way to other foreign issuers. This is not a blanket "foreign company = risky" flag — a Taiwan, Israel, or Korea-domiciled issuer doesn't get this point.

The score is a heuristic summary of public filing patterns, not a prediction and not a substitute for reading the actual filings — every data point links back to its source document.

Known limitations

• Insider ownership percentage isn't shown yet — no reliable free structured data source exists for it (would require aggregating individual Form 3/4/5 filings).
• Offering-type classification and dollar amounts are extracted from filing text with pattern matching. It's a best-effort read, not guaranteed accurate — always check the linked source filing.
• Market cap and price are refreshed periodically, not real-time.

Update cadence

New filings are picked up in periodic batch runs, not instantly. The "last updated" date on each stock page reflects when its data was last refreshed.