The LSE Directory / Fundamental data
Value Line, Inc. is an independent investment research and financial publishing firm headquartered in New York City and traded on Nasdaq under the ticker VALU. It is best known for the Value Line Investment Survey, which ranks and analyzes roughly 1,700 US stocks on a weekly basis using its proprietary Timeliness and Safety ranking systems. Beyond the flagship Survey, the company publishes related products including the Value Line 600, a Fund Advisor Plus service covering mutual funds, and options and ETF research, with its research franchise touching roughly 5,000 equities, over 2,800 ETFs, and about 19,000 mutual funds according to the company's own site. The firm's differentiator within equity research is its combination of human analyst coverage with a systematic, rules-based ranking overlay rather than discretionary buy or sell calls tied to investment banking relationships. The original ranking method was a visual technique Arnold Bernhard used to fit a cash flow line to a stock's price chart; in 1965, at the urging of statistician Samuel Eisenstadt, the firm replaced this with ordinary least squares regression analysis, giving the Timeliness Rank a quantitative, back tested foundation. That rank drew rare academic validation when economist Fischer Black published a 1973 paper finding it had genuine predictive power, a result still cited in discussions of the Survey's methodology. Value Line sells its research by subscription to individual investors, professional money managers, and libraries, distinguishing it from sell side research tied to trading desks. Value Line was founded in 1931 by Arnold Bernhard, a former Moody's Investors Service employee who set out after the 1929 crash to build a more disciplined method of stock valuation. The company went public on Nasdaq in May 1983, with the Bernhard family initially retaining about 80 percent ownership. Bernhard died in December 1987 and was succeeded as CEO by his daughter, Jean Buttner. In November 2009 the SEC found that Value Line and certain executives had defrauded mutual fund shareholders of roughly 24 million dollars over nearly two decades through undisclosed brokerage commission arrangements; the firm paid 43.7 million dollars in penalties and restitution as part of the settlement. Following that episode, Value Line restructured its asset management business: it no longer manages the Value Line mutual funds directly but instead holds a non voting revenue interest and a 50 percent non voting profits interest in EULAV Asset Management (EAM), a Delaware statutory trust that now serves as the funds' investment adviser. For the three months ended July 31, 2025 (its fiscal 2026 first quarter), Value Line reported net income of 6.46 million dollars, up 9.7 percent year over year, with EAM receipts of 5.12 million dollars, up 20.7 percent, and shareholders' equity of just over 103 million dollars. Trailing twelve month revenue was approximately 33.8 million dollars and the company's market capitalization was roughly 375 million dollars, with about 117 employees, according to financial data aggregators as of mid 2026.
