Space and engineering stocks

Screening Filters

1. Market Cap: 200M – 30B USD

   • Purpose: Focus on small- to mid-cap companies, similar in scale and risk profile to SPCE.
   • Rationale:
     • Virgin Galactic (SPCE) is not a mega-cap aerospace company like Boeing or Lockheed Martin; it sits in the smaller, more speculative part of the market.
     • Limiting market cap to this range filters out huge diversified conglomerates whose performance is driven by many non‑space segments, and also removes micro/nano caps that are too illiquid or fundamentally weak.
     • This range captures companies that, like SPCE, are still in the growth/experimentation phase of commercial space or advanced engineering rather than fully mature defense primes.

2. Beta: HighRisk

   • Purpose: Capture highly volatile, high-risk stocks.
   • Rationale:
     • SPCE is known for large price swings driven by news on launches, test flights, regulation, and funding. Its beta is typically elevated relative to the market.
     • Setting beta to “HighRisk” focuses on stocks whose price behavior resembles SPCE: sensitive to sentiment, news, and sector hype (such as the broader “space economy” narrative).
     • This is relevant to understanding SPCE’s performance because its peers in the same risk bucket will show how space/engineering names with similar volatility trade and re-rate over time.

3. Monthly Average Dollar Volume: ≥ 100,000 USD

   • Purpose: Ensure the stocks are reasonably liquid and actively traded.
   • Rationale:
     • SPCE is actively traded and fairly liquid; to compare it meaningfully, you want peers that institutions and serious investors can actually buy and sell without huge slippage.
     • A minimum dollar volume excludes obscure, illiquid tickers that might operate in “space” or “engineering” on paper but are not price-discovery driven, making any performance comparison less useful.
     • This supports a more realistic assessment of sector sentiment and valuation, not distorted by illiquidity.

4. Industry: Aerospace & Defense; Communications & Networking; Telecommunications Services

   • Purpose: Capture the industrial and technological context around the space and engineering sector.
   • Rationale:
     • Aerospace & Defense: This is SPCE’s closest formal industry bucket. It includes companies designing, manufacturing, or operating aircraft, spacecraft, launch systems, and related defense/space technologies—directly relevant to SPCE’s commercial spaceflight business.
     • Communications & Networking and Telecommunications Services: Many space-economy firms operate satellites or infrastructure for communications (e.g., satellite internet, data links, Earth observation networks).
       • Including these industries brings in companies where the “space” element is tied to engineering and communications payloads, not just launch vehicles.
       • This broadens the comparison set to the full space/engineering value chain: launch, spacecraft, satellites, and the communication networks they enable.
     • Together, these industries frame SPCE within both its core aerospace role and its adjacency to space-based communications infrastructure.

5. Themes: Aerospace & Defense; Space Economy

   • Purpose: Explicitly target companies thematically linked to space and aerospace, beyond raw industry codes.
   • Rationale:
     • Aerospace & Defense theme: Ensures that included companies are actually recognized as part of the aerospace/defense ecosystem, even if their formal industry classification is broad.
     • Space Economy theme: Directly ties the screen to the user’s focus—stocks where revenue potential or strategic positioning is meaningfully connected to space activities (launch, satellites, in-orbit services, space tourism, etc.).
     • This is particularly relevant for SPCE, whose story is almost entirely about the emerging commercial space economy rather than traditional aviation or defense.
     • Theme filters help avoid false positives (e.g., generic telecoms with zero space exposure) and keep the peer set focused on companies whose fortunes move with developments in space and advanced engineering.

6. Revenue TTM: ≥ 1 USD

   • Purpose: Exclude pre-revenue or shell/blank-check entities and keep only operating businesses.
   • Rationale:
     • SPCE, while still early and not highly mature in revenue terms, is an operating company with actual reported revenue.
     • Filtering for at least some trailing-twelve-month revenue removes pure concept stocks, SPAC shells, and inactive entities that don’t yet have operational performance to analyze.
     • This allows for a cleaner comparison of real business performance in the space/engineering segment (e.g., revenue trends, margins, and valuation multiples).

Why Results Match

• The sector and theme filters (Aerospace & Defense, Space Economy, related industries) directly target SPCE’s business domain: commercial spaceflight and advanced aerospace engineering.
• The market cap and high-beta filters align with SPCE’s profile as a smaller, speculative, and volatile space company, making the peer set relevant both in risk and growth stage.
• The liquidity and revenue filters ensure that the stocks identified are genuinely traded, functioning businesses, so their price movements and fundamentals can be meaningfully compared to SPCE’s performance.

Overall, these filters are designed to give you a focused universe of stocks that sit in the same “space and engineering” ecosystem as SPCE and share broadly similar risk characteristics, so that SPCE’s relevance and performance can be evaluated in a realistic sector context.