Stock Market Screener - Find Stocks that Match Your Criteria
Stock market screener is a tool which helps investors and traders to find high probability stocks or mutual funds/ ETFs trading opportunities based on user defined criteria.
You can find many free stock and fund market screeners on the web today. Almost every financial portal and the most important news media offer you to filter stocks or funds according to different criteria. The major difference between several available stock screening options is in the criteria you can provide for filtering. Most of screeners offer you to filter the stocks and other instruments by basic trading information like price, volume and the stock exchange where the instrument is quoted, basic fundamental figures like Price/Earnings ratio (P/E) or Price/Book ratio (P/B) for example, technical setup (above/below moving averages) and by sector or industry the company operates in. Some sites require you to sign up to free membership before they give you the access to the stock market screener. Besides free market screeners there are some powerful stock screeners like Bloomberg and Reuters, which only investment professionals can afford, but this is not the subject of this article. Following we present the most popular free stocks screeners you can find on the web today.
MarketWatch Stock Market Screener
MarketWatch has an intraday stock screener, which you can use for free without registering first. You can search for stocky by price range in absolute terms from-to x U.S. dollars, by daily percentage change in days or specific intraday session, or by price of the stock trading below or above 52 week low/high. You also have some possibilities of filtering by volume, fundamentals (P/E, market capitalization), technical ratios and industry. MarketWatch stock screener covers NYSE, Nasdaq and AMEX stock exchanges.
FINVIZ.com Stock Market Screener
FINVIZ.com has a very powerful stock screener. You can start by simply sorting results without using any of the filters available. For example, you can sort results by top gainers/losers, new high/low, most volatile, most active, unusual volume, overbought/oversold, daily downgrades/upgrades, earnings release before market open or after market close, recent insider buying/selling activity, major news, TL support/resistance, wedge up/down, ascending or descending triangle, wedge, channel up or down, double or multiple top or bottom, head & shoulders and other signals. Screener is running on a database of US stocks (NYSE, Nasdaq, AMEX). You can filter by sector, industry, market capitalization, dividend yield, float short, analyst recommendation, if the stock has issued options and/or is shortable, by earnings date, average trading volume, relative volume, current volume and absolute price. You have the option to save up to 50 results as portfolio. By clicking on the stock symbol you will find some very interesting data, all in one page, which is very suitable to use: chart, table of all possible financial, trading and fundamental data, analyst's recommendations in the latest period, latest news and insider activity (buy or sell of stocks, option exercise).
Yahoo Finance Stock Market Screener
Yahoo Finance stock screener has some interesting filters which cannot be found on many other stock market screeners. For example filtering by Beta/ Volatility of the stock and is very strong on filtering by some balance sheet and income statement data, like for example sales revenue or profit margin. Besides sales and profitability you can filter stocks by price earnings, price book, price sales and also by price earnings growth (PEG) ratio. You can also filter stocks by highest expected earnings growth by analysts. An interesting choice for stock market investing beginners might be also average analyst recommendation for the stock, which can be a raging from 1=Buy, 2=Buy/Hold, 3=Hold, 4=Sell/Hold to 5=Sell. You can search for U.S. trading stocks only, filter by industry or index membership: Dow Jones Industrial, Dow Jones Transportation, Dow Jones Utilities, S&P 500, S&P 400 Midcap, S&P 600 SmallCap.
Zacks Stock Market Screener
Zacks has a powerful customizable stock screener as well. You can select the category of popular criteria on the left and then pick the criteria you want and include it in the screener. You actually have to build the stock screener first and when done, you can run it. You can go in very details with the criteria; it takes some time to get used to it, but when done, it can return you some valuable information. Most of the criteria are FREE for inclusion; however there are some of them which require you to have premium subscription to use them. Some of such popular premium criteria are Zacks Rank, Industry Rank and Recommendation. Zacks Premium is free for 30 days.
Morningstar Stock Market Screener
Morningstar has a unique stock screener. The first difference among other stock screeners is the possibility to filter stock by stock type: aggressive growth, classic growth, cyclical, distressed, hard assets, high yield, slow growth, and speculative growth. Next criteria not available elsewhere are to filter stocks by style box: large, mid or small and value, core, or growth. You can also filter the stocks by Morningstar Stock Grades: Growth Grade, Profitability Grade and Financial health grade.
Google Finance Stock Market Screener
We didn't forget about Google stocks screener. It has similar criteria available as majority of already mentioned stock screeners. The major advantage we would like to expose is the ease of use. You have a visual module to set the figures by simply dragging the mouse to set your wishes. The visualization is useful because it shows the user where the majority of companies is and is therefore much easier to set criteria to your own needs.
There are some other stock market screeners available online we didn't cover. If some of them is of such high quality that it deserves our visitor's attention, you can add it in the comment form bellow.
Written by: Goran Dolenc
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