Can anyone explain why the Altman Z score is negative -2.2. The rest of the companies metrics look very good and it has a high Stockopedia Score.
It’s driven by the market value of equity over book value of liabilities being a negative number which I think is because because the net debt value is negative. I’ve raised the issue before on a different share but not had a reply.
SharePad has it’s Altman Z as 3.4.
I raised this issue with the team a month or so back - I had noticed it on Sylvania Platinum (LON:SLP) too - they confirmed that the calculation of the Altman is wrong on some StockReports when total liabilities is negative.
They have it on their bug fix list, although I believe it will take some time to rectify.
The Altman Z is this is one of the inputs to the Quality Rank so sadly this will be having a slight impact on the Quality Rank and the StockRank of the affected companies, probably not enough to dramatically shift the ranks though.
It will be more of an issue for those who filter out stocks that appear as in distress on the Altman Z-score. Although I use this I check the details rather than rely on simple screening hence am not concerned about the Sylvania Platinum (LON:SLP) Z-score.
Thanks for drawing attention to this Nick. I remember checking out Sylvania Platinum a couple of months ago after reading about it in Investors Chronicle and was put off by the low Altman Z even though the other fundamentals seemed ok. I guess the underlying message is that one should look at the whole picture and not rely on a single parameter.
The reason for its low Z score is the large negative value for “minority interest” in its balance sheet under non-current liabilities. I would have thought a negative liability is an asset. If you go to SP’s website you can see that the “minority interests” figure come from the table on Equity where it is described by the alternative term “non-controlling interest”. It looks to me as if the negative equity figure has been cut and pasted into the non-current liabilities section without removing the minus sign. It should surely show up as a real liability and if it did the Z-score would be positive? I have raised this issue with Stockopedia
