Which stock screener do you use
Just getting my feet wet in the hobby of stock picking. What stock screener do you use
I am looking for a stock screener that would allow me to search by sector, show me PE, PB, PS, ROA ratios..... trying to look for value and growth stocks.
Any advice would be appreciated
imho any standard screener will do. The 2 brokers i use have OK screeners.
might i mention a warning. Screeners by their very nature are backward-looking tools. They typically consider the dividends, earnings & financials of the past 52 weeks only.
if any unusual event were to have occurred - perhaps company disposed of a smallish subsidiary & took the profits into earnings, or perhaps company paid out a rare extra special dividend - the previous 52-week data will be severely distorted.
if a screener were to take 5-year data, or 10-year data, into consideration, the results might be more reliable, but unfortunately the generally-available screeners that i've seen were past 52 weeks only.
screeners are useful to generate broad spectrum lists of possibilities. However i believe that each company which thus becomes a candidate for purchase should be more carefully examined by studying data directly from its own financial statements, and by checking back for several years.
http://finviz.com/ is a great free screener + news aggregator, but it doesn't work with canadian stocks.
Thanks for the warning. I agree screeners are good for short listing companies prior to doing a more thorough search of 5 to 10 years data.Originally Posted by humble_pie
Thanks ddkay, great tool. I was able to specify the country as 'Canada', check the TSX stock ticker, and then to do my research on the list generated.
Sorry to clarify, it doesn't work with Canadian stocks unless they're cross listed on American exchanges, but yeah great free tool
The downside is that Canadian stocks that are not listed on American exchanges will not show on this tool. Would be nice to find a Canadian screener.Sorry to clarify, it doesn't work with Canadian stocks unless they're cross listed on American exchanges, but yeah great free tool
TMX does have a screener for Canadian stocks that you can access for tree on Stockhouse.com.
I would also second the motion for Finviz.com. They do have some forward looking tools on that one including forward PE, forward sales growth, eps growth next year although the reliability of these measures has been shown to be poor in the literature.
They also have a really good one to screen for sales growth over the past year and past 5 years which I think is very valuable to help try and avoid value traps or declining businesses (at least on a backward looking basis).
It also has a lot of good technical indicators that will help you find stocks close to highs if you are a momentum guy or near lows if you are a contrarian.
Perhaps the feature I like best about their screener is they will actually look up insider transactions - I believe that insider buys are a strong predictor of future stock gains and really like to add this one to any screen that I do with them.
They also allow you to save your searches so you can develop some favorites that you can repeat once a week/month for new stocks to explore.
I use the GLOBE AND MAIL stock filter. Searches P/E, 3 year growth, market cap, TSX, venture, etc.
I mainly search for Winners. Stocks which have appreciated 50-70% YTD and are trending nicely. Buy on weakness sell in strength within Bolinger bands. Very common. 5-10% per month swing trading goal.
Yesterday I bought 2300 ENB on the dip at $40.35, will exit at around $41+ for a nice 1.5-2% swing.
ENB has a beautiful chart.
I also invest in dividend growth companies long term. Globe and Mail filters all exchanges.
Last edited by Lucy; 2012-06-01 at 08:10 AM.
Anyone subscribe to stockcharts for their screener and charting.
Wondering if their screener is good.
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