Billion-dollar companies like Apple and Facebook aren’t as cash-rich as you might think. But these two surprising stocks are.

Do you have a little Scrooge McDuck in you? I know I sure do.

Scrooge McDuck, the fabulously wealthy uncle of Donald Duck modeled after Ebenezer Scrooge, loves to swim in his pile of gold coins and mountain of dollar bills.

I don’t have anywhere near enough wealth to swim in, but I admire (and often invest in) companies that are sitting on Scrooge McDuck-style cash hordes.

Here is a list of the U.S. companies with the largest treasure chests of cash in the world:

• Apple (AAPL) — $210.6 billion

• Microsoft (MSFT) — $133.8 billion

• Alphabet (GOOGL) — $121.1 billion

• Facebook (FB) — $48.6 billion

• IBM (IBM) — $46.3 billion

• Amazon (AMZN) — $41.5 billion

• Oracle (ORCL) — $37.8 billion

• Cisco (CSCO) — $33.4 billion

As you can see, Apple, Microsoft and Google all have over $100 billion of cold, hard cash in the bank. However, there's something more important than the nominal dollar amount. That is, how much that cash is as a percentage of the stock price.

Quite a different story when that cash is shown as a percentage of the stock price, isn’t it?

Under this list, Apple and Facebook aren’t as cash-rich as you might think. Meanwhile, Scrooge McDuck would go bananas over cash-rich IBM and Oracle.

Let me be clear; cash in the bank is wonderful, but it should not be used as a standalone "Buy"/"Sell" indicator. It is just one factor — though a very important one —that you should consider when evaluating a stock.

Which is exactly what we do at Weiss Ratings.

Weiss Ratings is a rules-based rating system that takes thousands of pieces of stock data and, based on its own model, balances potential reward against the amount of risk to assign a rating.

These ratings are based on cold, hard numbers and emphasize strong balance sheets and rock-solid financial statements. Here’s how it works:

The results provide a simple and understandable opinion as to whether we think the stock is a “Buy,” “Sell” or “Hold.”

To check the Weiss Rating on any stock, ETF or mutual fund, go to https://greyhouse.weissratings.com and enter the ticker in the search bar.

Presto! You’ll become a better-informed — and, in my opinion, a more successful — investor.

Best wishes,

Tony Sagami