Glossary
What the numbers and terms on Sectivia mean, from market cap and P/E to value chains and cross-sector relations. Each entry opens with a one-line definition and then explains how Sectivia calculates or uses it.
3M, 6M and 1Y returns
The share price change over roughly the last 3 months, 6 months or 1 year, in percent, without dividends.
3M, 6M and 1Y show how much the share price has changed over the last 13, 26 and 52 weeks. A 1Y return of +40% means the price is 40 percent higher than it was a year ago.
These are price returns: dividends are not added back, so for a company that pays a large dividend the total return to a shareholder was higher. Past returns do not tell you what future returns will be.
ADR (American Depositary Receipt)
A certificate traded on a U.S. exchange that represents shares of a foreign company.
An ADR lets investors buy a foreign company, such as TSMC or Novo Nordisk, on a U.S. exchange in U.S. dollars. One ADR can stand for one share, several shares or a fraction of a share of the underlying stock.
Many foreign companies report their results in their home currency. For those, Sectivia shows the market cap in that currency and leaves it out of dollar comparisons, while the price is the ADR's price in dollars.
As of date
The U.S. trading day the numbers describe, updated once per trading day after the market closes.
Every figure on Sectivia belongs to a U.S. trading day, counted in New York time. The data is collected after the close and may reach the site after midnight in Europe, but the date always refers to the trading session it describes.
On weekends and market holidays no new data is published, so the date stays on the last trading day.
Cross-sector relation
A relation between companies in two different sectors, for example a power producer supplying a cloud company's data centers.
Most relations on Sectivia stay inside one sector. Some important links run between sectors instead: power producers, for example, sell electricity to the cloud companies that run AI data centers.
A cross-sector relation is shown with the sector of the company on the other side, so you can see where a chain leaves the sector.
Customer
A company that buys a product or service from a supplier, shown on Sectivia as the company a relation's arrow points at.
Customers are the demand side of a relation. When a large customer raises or cuts its spending, the effect travels back through its suppliers.
A company can be a supplier in one relation and a customer in another. The supply chain pages show both sides for every mapped company.
Earnings date (BMO/AMC)
The day a company reports quarterly results, either before the market opens (BMO) or after it closes (AMC).
Most listed companies report results every quarter. The earnings date is the day the report comes out, often together with a call for analysts.
BMO (before market open) means the numbers arrive before trading starts at 9:30 a.m. New York time, so the stock reacts the same day. AMC (after market close) means they arrive after 4:00 p.m., so the reaction shows in the next day's trading. Companies set the dates themselves and can change them.
Market cap
The total market value of a company's shares: the share price times the number of shares outstanding.
Market capitalization is the share price multiplied by the number of shares outstanding. It is the stock market's price tag on the whole company, not a measure of its revenue or its assets.
Sectivia shows market cap in U.S. dollars. If a company reports its figures in another currency, its market cap is shown in that currency and left out of the rankings and heatmaps that compare sizes in dollars.
Median
The middle value when numbers are sorted from low to high: half the companies are above it and half below.
To find the median, sort the values and take the one in the middle, or the average of the two middle values when the count is even. Unlike the average, the median is not pulled far off by one extreme value, such as a single stock that doubled in a day.
Sector pages use the median to sum up a group, for example the median move today or the median P/E. The median P/E only counts companies with positive earnings.
Negative earnings (no P/E)
A company that lost money over the last 12 months has no meaningful P/E ratio, so Sectivia shows a dash instead of a figure.
When earnings over the last twelve months are negative, dividing the share price by them would give a negative number that cannot be compared with other companies' P/E ratios. The data source reports no P/E for such companies, so Sectivia shows a dash where the P/E would be. A dash can also simply mean that no figure was available that day. If a negative P/E ever does come through, Sectivia labels it "neg." rather than showing the number.
Losses are common among young companies that spend heavily on growth, for example in quantum computing or biotech. For them, the P/S ratio is often a more useful yardstick. The screener's Positive P/E only filter, the lowest P/E rankings and the median P/E on sector pages all leave out companies without a positive P/E.
P/B ratio
Price to book: the company's market value divided by its book value, which is its assets minus its liabilities.
Book value is what the balance sheet says belongs to shareholders: total assets minus total liabilities. P/B compares the market value with that figure. A P/B of 1 means the market values the company at its accounting net worth.
P/B says most about banks and insurers, whose assets are largely financial and carried close to market prices. For software or drug companies much of the value, such as patents, brands and know-how, is not on the balance sheet, so their P/B tends to be high. When book value is negative, as it is for some companies that have piled up losses or bought back many shares, P/B is not meaningful and Sectivia shows a dash instead of a figure.
P/E ratio
Price to earnings: the share price divided by the company's earnings per share over the last 12 months.
The P/E ratio tells you how many dollars the market pays for each dollar of yearly profit. A P/E of 25 means the company is valued at 25 times its earnings over the last twelve months (trailing twelve months, or TTM).
A high P/E often means investors expect profits to grow; a low one can reflect slower growth, higher risk or simply a lower price. Normal levels differ a lot between industries, so P/E is most useful when comparing similar companies. A company that lost money over the last twelve months has no meaningful P/E, so Sectivia shows a dash in its place.
P/S ratio
Price to sales: the company's market value divided by its revenue over the last 12 months.
The P/S ratio compares the market value of a company with its sales over the last twelve months. A P/S of 5 means the market pays 5 dollars for each dollar of yearly revenue.
Because revenue stays positive even when a company loses money, P/S also works for companies without profits. It ignores costs, though: two companies with the same P/S can have very different profit margins.
Price
The price of one share at the close of the latest U.S. trading day, in U.S. dollars.
Sectivia updates prices once a day, after the U.S. stock market closes, so the price shown is the closing price of the trading day named on the page. It is not a live quote.
For a foreign company listed in the U.S. through an ADR, the price is the price of the ADR on the U.S. exchange.
Price history
Daily closing prices recorded by Sectivia itself, starting June 26, 2026.
Sectivia's price charts are built from its own daily closing snapshots. The first snapshot is from June 26, 2026, so every chart starts on that date or later, and a new point is added after each U.S. trading day.
The charts are therefore not all-time histories. Days without a recorded price are left as gaps rather than filled in.
Private company
A company whose shares are not listed on a stock exchange, so it has no public share price or daily figures.
Some important companies in a value chain are privately owned. Sectivia includes them where they matter for the map, but shows no price, market cap or ratios for them, because their shares do not trade on an exchange.
Ordinary investors usually cannot buy shares in a private company directly. Some of them can be reached indirectly through listed companies that own a stake.
Relation
A business link between two companies in which one supplies the other, which Sectivia maps by hand.
Each relation says that company A sells something to company B. Sectivia maps the relations by hand. Some are disclosed in annual reports and other company filings; others are inferred from how the industry is structured: what a company sells and who buys that kind of product.
A relation shows that a business link exists, not how large it is. Where it is known, Sectivia also shows what is supplied and cites the source. The full set of relations is published in Sectivia's open dataset.
Sector index
An equal-weighted average of each company's price change since its first close in Sectivia's price history.
The sector index starts at 100. Each company's price is set to 100 on its first day in Sectivia's price history, and the index is the plain average of those values, so every company counts equally, whatever its size. An index of 112 means the average company in the sector is up 12 percent since the start.
That makes it different from indexes weighted by market cap, such as the S&P 500, where the largest companies dominate the result.
Segment
A group of companies doing the same kind of work inside a sector, such as chips or cloud platforms in AI.
Each sector on Sectivia is split into segments, ordered along its value chain. Every company sits in exactly one segment of one sector, chosen by its main business.
Comparisons within a segment are usually the fairest, because the companies share a business model and face similar costs and demand.
Supplier
A company that sells a product or service to another company, shown on Sectivia at the start of a relation's arrow.
A supplier provides something another company needs for its own business: chips, equipment, electricity, software, manufacturing or research services. On Sectivia the arrow of a relation runs from the supplier to the customer.
A supplier that depends on one or two large customers is exposed to their decisions: if they buy less, the supplier feels it quickly. Company filings often name customers that make up a large share of revenue.
Today's change
How much the share price moved on the latest trading day, in percent of the previous day's closing price.
Today's change compares the latest closing price with the closing price of the trading day before. A change of +2.0% means the stock closed 2 percent higher than the day before.
On weekends and market holidays there is no new trading session, so Sectivia keeps showing the move of the last trading day.
TTM (trailing twelve months)
The last four reported quarters added together, used so that ratios reflect a full year of results.
TTM figures add up the four most recent quarterly reports. That gives a full year of earnings or sales without waiting for the annual report, and it updates each time a new quarter is reported.
The P/E and P/S ratios on Sectivia use TTM earnings and TTM revenue.
Value chain
The steps a product passes through, from components and equipment to the finished service a customer pays for.
A value chain lines up the companies that each add a step. In AI, for example: chip equipment, chips and accelerators, data centers with their cooling and power, cloud platforms and finally AI software. Each step depends on the ones before it.
Sectivia sorts every sector into segments along its value chain and draws the supplier and customer links between companies, so you can see who depends on whom.
YTD (year to date)
The change in share price since the last close of the previous calendar year, in percent.
YTD stands for year to date. It measures the price change from the final close of last year to the latest close. In early January it covers only a few days and says little; by December it is close to a full year's change.
Like the other returns on Sectivia, it is a price return: dividends are not included.