Why we built the Berkshire Lens scanner

Most of the scanners in the AstroTrades lab study short-cycle flow: 0DTE gamma, single-day max pain, intraday risk-reversal structures, options sweeps. They produce 0–8 artifacts a day and live in a 15-minute-to-2-hour decision window.

The Berkshire Lens scanner is the opposite. It runs once a week against the lab's full equity watchlist, applies an eleven-criterion quality screen modeled on Buffett-Munger value principles, and produces a single research artifact only when a name clears all eleven gates. Most weeks it returns NO_REPLY. Some weeks it surfaces one name. In the eight months since launch, it has produced fourteen artifacts.

Why a quality lens?

The flow scanners are good at studying what is happening right now. They miss what a quality-of-business filter would catch over a 6-to-24-month holding period — the names that institutional capital is accumulating because the cash flow durability, return-on-capital, and competitive moat support a long-cycle thesis.

The lab's research feedback loop kept surfacing the same gap: positions that the short-cycle scanners flagged for momentum reasons often had no underlying quality, and positions that did have underlying quality were invisible to the flow-driven scanners because institutions accumulate them slowly enough that no single day shows up as a sweep or a confluence event.

The Berkshire Lens was designed to fill that gap.

The eleven criteria

The screen is intentionally strict. A name must clear all eleven to produce an artifact:

1. Return on invested capital (ROIC) above 12% trailing 5 years
2. Free cash flow margin above 10% trailing 5 years
3. Debt-to-equity below 0.8
4. Earnings stability: no negative-EPS year in trailing 10
5. Revenue CAGR positive trailing 5 years
6. Gross margin above industry median + 5 percentage points
7. Insider ownership above 3% (founder/operator skin in the game)
8. Buyback or dividend trailing 3 years (capital return discipline)
9. No goodwill writedown trailing 3 years
10. Operating cash flow / net income > 0.9 (earnings quality)
11. Forward P/E below trailing 5-year average

The list is opinionated. It misses certain businesses — early-stage growth companies, capital-light tech with high R&D expensing, financials whose ratios mean something different. That's by design. The Berkshire Lens is a long-cycle compounding screen, not a universal quality filter.

What the scanner produces

When a name clears, the artifact includes the eleven gate scores, a one-paragraph thesis paragraph framed in observational language ("XOM cleared the lens with ROIC 14.2%, FCF margin 11.8%, and capital return discipline through the down-cycle..."), and the lab's standard invalidation criterion (which gate would have to fail to void the thesis).

The scanner output is routed to both the Astro Trades and Astro Signals WhatsApp rooms with allocator-tier framing — no buy recommendations, no price targets, no position sizing. It's a quality flag, not a trade alert.

How it slots into the portfolio

The full scanner portfolio now spans three time horizons:

• Intraday (minutes to hours): 0DTE gamma map, max pain, risk reversal, flow hunter, fear reversal
• Multi-day (days to weeks): smart-money confluence, conviction signature, OI scanner, sector correlations, structural triggers
• Long-cycle (months to years): Berkshire Lens, seasonality monthly bias

The Berkshire Lens is the only long-cycle quality screen. It produces artifacts at a frequency that makes them feel valuable — a few times a month at most — and the artifacts have stayed in research mode (no fast invalidation) for the lab's full study window.

In the next post we'll walk through the smart-money confluence scanner — the second cornerstone of the multi-day layer — and show how the lab interprets congress + insider + flow alignment when three independent signatures point the same direction.

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This post is part of the AstroTrades research journal. Educational only. AstroTrades publishes research artifacts and analytics. We are not a broker, not investment advice, and not managed trading. Futures and options involve substantial risk; you make your own independent risk decisions.