Top 10 Australian stocks, ranked by price-based X-Ray score

The ranking reads only what a share price and its trading volume show: how firmly the price is trending, how far it has moved over three, six and twelve months, how calm it has been (volatility and the deepest fall of the past year) and how easily the shares change hands. A fifth lens, income, counts only for companies that pay a dividend. We hold no company accounts for Australian-listed businesses, so profits, debt and valuation play no part, and we do not store an industry for them or their membership of the S&P/ASX 200. The page answers "which Australian shares have behaved well and are easy to trade", not "which are cheap".

One feature of the ASX changes how the scores read. Each lens is a percentile rank against every scored share on the exchange, and the ASX has 1,816 of them, a long tail of small mining explorers, biotechs and technology start-ups that trade rarely. The 297 companies ranked here are the liquid, established part of that market, so the typical one scores 73 out of 100 and not 50. A score of 75 on this page means "about average among liquid ASX companies". The gap between rank 1 and rank 10 is only 3.7 points today, so the order inside the top ten is close and a small price move can reorder it.

Of the 333 lines on the ASX that trade at least $1 million a day, 25 belong to companies registered outside Australia and are left out. Some are New Zealand companies with a second listing in Sydney, including Xero, Fisher & Paykel Healthcare, Spark and Auckland Airport; New Zealand's own market sets their price, and New Zealand is not Australia. Others are US, Irish, British or Canadian companies, such as ResMed, Newmont, Amcor and News Corporation, that trade on the ASX through CHESS Depositary Interests (CDIs), certificates that let Australian investors hold foreign shares.

The test is the country code at the start of each share's ISIN, "AU" for Australian companies, which is a rule about where the company is registered. A CDI carries an Australian ISIN even when the company is American, so for those lines the code alone is not enough, and a reviewed list removes the foreign companies we found. A foreign company can still slip through; tell us if you spot one.

11 liquid lines are listed investment companies and income funds, such as Argo Investments or Australian Foundation Investment Company. They hold portfolios of other companies' shares or loans, and their price follows the value of that portfolio and a discount or premium to it, not the profits of a business, so ranking them next to BHP or CSL would compare different things. They are removed by name and by a reviewed list.

Property and infrastructure groups are a different case and stay in. Many of the largest, including APA, Transurban, Dexus, Goodman and Scentre, trade as stapled securities: a trust unit and a company share bound together and priced as one line. We rank each as the single line it trades as. Their payouts behave differently from an ordinary company's, which the Australian dividend list explains.

ASX prices are in Australian dollars. Each company's daily traded value is converted into US dollars at the latest exchange rate before the $1 million cut-off is applied, so the threshold means the same here as on the UK, Canadian or German lists. All ten of today's leaders trade more than $5 million a day. The cut-off matters more here than in most markets because so many ASX shares are thinly traded: a share that rarely changes hands can look very calm only because nobody is buying or selling, which is why liquidity is a filter first and a score second.

The leader is APA Group, and its strongest lens is low-risk. The top three are APA Group, New Hope Corporation Ltd, Ampol Ltd. All three sit near the top of the trading-volume lens, which is where the largest ASX names score close to 100. All 10 pay a dividend; the income lens is worth only a tenth of the score, so a company that pays nothing is not heavily penalised.

The ten stocks returned a median 45% over the last twelve months, against -4% for all 297 eligible Australian companies. The typical liquid ASX company fell over the year, so the ten are not just riding a rising market; they are the companies whose prices held and climbed while most of the market did not. That is still information about the past and not a forecast: a price-based ranking is built from what has already happened.

Use the table to pick companies for a closer look, then read the company's own annual report and its announcements on the ASX website; listed companies must publish price-sensitive news there first. A price-only ranking is most useful for removing shares that are hard to trade or stuck in a downtrend, and least useful for judging whether a price is fair. For income, the Australian dividend list ranks the same companies on a different rule.