Coverage gate
Every Moat Score is computed from specific line items in a company’s SEC filings — gross margins over up to ten years, invested capital, debt and interest, owner earnings, share counts. The coverage gate is the rule for what happens when some of those inputs simply aren’t there: the company gets insufficient data, not a number.
The temptation every scoring system faces is to fill gaps — interpolate, assume an industry average, quietly drop the missing filter. We think a wrong number dressed as a real one is worse than an honest blank, because you can’t tell it apart from the trustworthy numbers around it. So the gate is binary: either the filings support the score, or there is no score.
How the Moat Index applies this
On a company page, a gated company shows “insufficient data” along with which inputs were missing — the gap is documented, not papered over. The analyzer gives the same refusal rather than a guess. The same honesty runs through the fundamentals charts, where a year a company didn’t report renders as a gap, never an interpolated line. The Index currently publishes scores for 2,182 companies — every one of them passed the gate. The methodology lists the honest limits this rule protects.