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Stock Screeners A few weeks ago,
Business Week Magazine shut down its free stock Quick Stock Search and
Advanced Stock Search screeners. That’s unfortunate because Business
Week’s screeners were easier to use than other screeners with similar
capabilities.
If you’re not familiar with the term, a screener is
a program that allows you to search through the entire market for stocks
or mutual funds meeting your selection requirements. For instance, you
could use a screener to list stocks with price/earnings ratios between
15 and 20, and annual sales greater than $20 billion.
Two Left Standing
The demise of Business Week’s screeners leaves only two
full-featured screeners that we can use for free, MSN Money’s Deluxe
Screener and Reuters’ PowerScreener Lite. Both offer more screening
choices than Business Week’s screeners did, but both take some time to
learn. It’s time well spent, however, and once you get the hang of using
them, they’ll become your best friends.
Find MSN’s screener from its homepage (moneycentral.msn.com)
by selecting
Investing and then
Stock Screener. Once there, click on the Deluxe Stock Screener link
to download the free screener program. Coincidentally, MSN’s screener
only works with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, it won’t work with
Firefox or other non-Microsoft browsers.
You can find Reuters’ free screener from Reuters
Investing homepage (www.investor.reuters.com)
by selecting
Ideas & Screening and then clicking on
PowerScreener Lite.
Here are some other screeners you may find useful
if you don’t want to spend time learning the MSN and/or Reuters’
programs.
Morningstar Screens on Grades
Morningstar’s Stock Screener, while not as flexible as the MSN
and Reuters’ screeners, allows you to search for stocks based on its
proprietary “stock grades.” Morningstar grades stocks from A to F in
three categories: growth, profitability, and financial health. So you
could, for example, look for stocks with A grades in all three
categories. Also unique to Morningstar, you can search for stocks based
on its stock type definitions such as “speculative growth,” “slow
growth,” or “high yield.”
Find Morningstar’s Stock Screener from its homepage
(www.morningstar.com)
by selecting
Stocks and then
Stock Screener in the Tools section.
Yahoo's Simple Screener
If you want a very simple screener, Yahoo’s Basic Stock Screener
fits that bill. You can limit your search to stocks within a particular
industry and/or a member of a particular index such as the S&P 500. Then
you can choose from 13 additional selection factors such as
price/earnings ratio, expected earnings growth, or dividend yield.
Find Yahoo’s Basic Screener from its Finance
homepage (finance.yahoo.com)
by selecting
Screener in the Stock Research section and then clicking on
Launch HTML Screener.
Momentum Screens
StockTables.com (www.stocktables.com)
offers a more specialized screener designed to pinpoint momentum
candidates. Momentum investors look for stocks with strong recent
earnings growth and strong relative strength, meaning that they have
already outperformed the overall market.
StockTables’ screener is easy to use. You select
values for a half-dozen or so selection parameters, mostly using
drop-down menus. Click on “help” for a description of each parameter
along with screening tips. StockTables is a pay site but I included it
here because it offers a free 14-day trial. You don’t need a credit card
for the trial; all that’s required is an e-mail address and password.
Let Gurus Pick Your Stocks
Validea is a service that picks stocks by emulating the published
strategies of famous market gurus such as Benjamin Graham or Peter
Lynch. Use of the Validea site (www.validea.com)
requires a subscription, but you run stock searches based on Validea’s
guru selection formulas free on the Nasdaq stock exchange site (www.nasdaq.com).
Validea offers eight different guru selection
strategies. You can list stocks currently meeting one guru’s criteria,
or you can combine them. For instance, you can screen for stocks that
value investor David Dreman and growth maven Martin Zweig would both
pick. Of course, this is all Validea’s interpretation. The real gurus
aren’t making the picks and they may not agree with Validea’s
conclusions.
Find Validea’s screener by selecting
Tools (top menu) on Nasdaq’s home page and then pick
Guru
Screener.
Zacks Offers Choice
Zacks Research, known mostly for compiling and distributing
analysts’ buy/sell ratings and earnings forecasts, also offers a variety
of stock selection services. While it charges for many of its services,
Zacks does provide a free stock screener, which comes in two versions.
You can use its Custom Screener to search for
stocks based on analyst ratings and forecasts, insider trading, and
other fundamental data. However, that screener is difficult to use. On
the other hand, Zacks’ Predefined Screener is user friendly. Simply
click on one of 11 predefined screen names, and Zacks lists 50 or so
stocks turned up by the screen. You can screen based on valuation,
dividend yields, recent share price movement, changes in analyst
buy/sell ratings, or changes in analysts’ earnings forecasts.
Click on
Screening on Zacks’ homepage (www.zacks.com)
to access both the custom and predefined screener programs.
Screening Takes Practice
Screening is a more reliable method of finding stock candidates
than listening to stock tips that you get from TV pundits or folks at
the gym. But it’s an art that takes practice. Your first screens will
turn up too many or too few stocks. When you do get the number right,
you probably won’t like most of the stocks. Keep at it. Eventually
you’ll devise screening rules that do turn up worthwhile candidates.
published 2/4/07 |
