Five points supporting the Spirent Communications share price at 251.5

Top analysts and investors such as Warren Buffett and Michael Mauboussin say capital allocation - the deployment of company time, money, ideas, and people - is the key to building moat-like quality and profitability characteristics. This is important as moat characteristics are perhaps the most fundamental driver of future share price performance.

In other words, if you find a company that consistently allocates its capital profitably, chances are you are onto a long-term winner – and Spirent Communications might be one such company.

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Screening for upwardly mobile, high quality companies

If, as an investor, you’re only looking at sales and earnings growth there is a vital question not being asked: how is this growth being funded?

That’s where ratios like return on equity (ROE) come in. ROE measures how efficiently a company uses Shareholders’ Equity to generate profits. It is calculated by dividing net income by book value of equity.

It’s no coincidence that Buffett is a fan of the measure - companies with high ROEs tend to exhibit the high-quality, moat-like business traits that he is so fond of gaining exposure to.

To find high ROE stocks whose fantastic business models are being rewarded by the market, you can create a stock screen that selects only stocks with both positive one-year relative strength and upgraded current year broker forecasts. The former ensures these shares have been outperforming the market and the latter suggests outperformance can continue.

One of the stocks that currently qualifies for this simple screen is Spirent Communications. The group has:

• A trailing twelve month return on equity of 20.6%

• An average current year EPS forecast upgrade of 0.74% from brokers, and

• A one-year relative strength of 90.6%
  

Stocks exhibiting these traits are typically a solid mix of quality and momentum. We can see this with Spirent Communications, which has a Quality Rank of 96 and a Momentum Rank of 99.

Studies indicate that combining factors such as Value, Quality and Momentum is a more effective way of outperforming the market over longer time frames. That's why we have constructed our StockReports to give an instant impression of how well exposed Spirent Communications (LON:SPT) is to these three factors. We go into greater detail on factor investing in this video.

Stockopedia helps you to identify return-enhancing factors such as Quality, Value and Momentum by analysing thousands of data points every day. To find out more about you find investment opportunities and analyse your portfolios then take one of our two-week free trials and have a look around.