Top 10 German 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. Each score is a percentile rank against every share on Xetra, so a trend score of 85 means the price is behaving better than roughly 85% of the shares on that market.

It cannot look inside the company. We hold no company accounts for German-listed businesses, so profits, debt and valuation play no part, and a share can climb this table for reasons the accounts would not support. We also do not store DAX, MDAX or SDAX membership, so the page cannot be filtered by index. It answers "which German shares have behaved well and are easy to trade", not "which German shares are cheap".

Xetra is Deutsche Börse's electronic exchange, and it trades far more than German companies: US, Dutch, French, Swiss and other foreign shares are listed on it as well. Of the 209 lines on Xetra that trade at least $1 million a day, 68 belong to companies registered outside Germany. They are left out here because their home market sets the price and the rules, and they belong on the page for that country.

The test is the country code at the start of each share's ISIN, the international securities identifier, which is "DE" for shares registered in Germany. That is a rule about where the shares are registered, not where the company sells its products: Siemens or BASF earn most of their money abroad and still count as German, while a business run from Germany but incorporated in another country would be treated as foreign. After the filter 141 German lines remain, and merging duplicate share classes (below) leaves 137 companies.

Some German companies have two kinds of listed shares: ordinary shares with a vote, and preference shares (Vorzugsaktien) that carry no vote in return for a priority claim on the dividend. Both lines of the same company are listed separately and often carry similar tickers, with preference shares frequently ending in a "3". Counting both would let one company occupy two places, so we keep one line per company, the more heavily traded of the two, and merged 4 duplicate lines on this basis. In today's top ten, Fuchs Petrolub SE (FPE3) is shown through the preference line because that is the one that trades more.

Across the whole German list, 5 of the 137 companies are represented by a preference line or a line whose name marks a special share class. Ticker, volume and score belong to the line shown, so the figures can differ a little from the company's other line.

Xetra prices are in euros. 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 on this page as on the UK or US lists. The cut-off is a floor, not a guarantee of depth: 2 of today's ten trade under $5 million a day on Xetra (MLP SE, Fuchs Petrolub SE). German shares also trade on other venues, and the volume recorded here is that of the Xetra listing, so a small figure for a smaller German company does not prove the shares are hard to trade, but it does mean you should check the spread before placing an order.

The leader is Deutsche Börse AG, and its strongest lens is trading volume. The top three are Deutsche Börse AG, Evonik Industries AG, MLP SE. 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 29% over the last twelve months, against 7% for all 137 eligible German companies. That gap shows how much of this score is momentum: a list built on price behaviour has usually already risen, which is information about the past and not a forecast.

Use the table to pick companies for a closer look, then read the company's own annual report (Geschäftsbericht) and latest interim statement on its investor-relations pages. 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 German dividend list ranks the same companies on a different rule.