# Which stock screener do you use



## King Tut (May 3, 2009)

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


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## humble_pie (Jun 7, 2009)

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.


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## ddkay (Nov 20, 2010)

http://finviz.com/ is a great free screener + news aggregator, but it doesn't work with canadian stocks.


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## King Tut (May 3, 2009)

humble_pie said:


> 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.


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.


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## King Tut (May 3, 2009)

ddkay said:


> http://finviz.com/ is a great free screener + news aggregator, but it doesn't work with canadian stocks.


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.


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## ddkay (Nov 20, 2010)

Sorry to clarify, it doesn't work with Canadian stocks unless they're cross listed on American exchanges, but yeah great free tool


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## King Tut (May 3, 2009)

ddkay said:


> 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.


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## PMREdmonton (Apr 6, 2009)

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.


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## Lucy (Mar 10, 2012)

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.


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## Lucy (Mar 10, 2012)

Anyone subscribe to stockcharts for their screener and charting.
Wondering if their screener is good.


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## Spidey (May 11, 2009)

One problem with screeners is they can be horribly inaccurate. The TD screener is often not even close to the key ratios and dividends displayed for that stock on their own site. I've posted this complaint on other financial forums and have been told that this is quite common.


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## Park (Sep 11, 2010)

About stock screeners, I don't necessarily believe the results of free screeners. As for the TD Waterhouse screener, ditto. I would be very reluctant to make decisions based on the results of those screeners. 

I've come to the conclusion that you have to pay to get a good screener. StockScreen123 seems to be a good screener, but it is limited to US stocks. Screener.co also appears to be a good screener, and seems to cover a lot of national stock markets including Canada.


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## PMREdmonton (Apr 6, 2009)

There are a few good ones I've run into.

For the US market Google has a pretty good one. Finviz also has a pretty good one.

The Canadian market was much worse as the one on the Globe and Mail and the one available on TMX were not that good, IMO. The new one from Google now allows you to pick the Canadian market and has a fair number of variables to use.

Zacks.com also has a decent screener but you have to become a member and some of the best aspects of Zacks is only available to the paid subscribers of their premium system.

You should always remember that most screeners are just to find stocks that are worthy of further assessment. In particular, if you are looking for growth you have to remember that some of the worst share price performance will come from stocks that are growing fastest as they attract a premium valuation based on growth that is not sustainable. You also have to remember that sometimes stocks are cheap for a good reason as stocks are traded upon estimates for future earnings which are not knowable and not based on past earnings. This is the decision that a value investor must make after screening for stocks.

Anyhow, good luck. Stock screeners can be a useful tool.


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## avrex (Nov 14, 2010)

Screeners are ok. 
With screeners, you are drilling down for subsets of data, to consider.

However, my preference is perform stock evaluations from larger sets of data. 
So, I'm looking for as much stock data as I can find.


*1. Free data vs. Subscription data*
The problem with me being a lowly retail investor, is I can't access the same tools/data (i.e. Bloomberg terminal, Compustat Data) as the big boys (institutional investors). At thousands of dollars per year, it's just too costly for me.

I guess there are some subscription services that us retail investors can check out, like the following:
Portfolio123.com $1000/year 
ycharts.com $600/year
Screener.co $300/year
However, I haven't utilized the above services, because..... well,, I guess I'm just too cheap.

The free ones like, Google Finance, Stockhouse.com, www.tmxmoney.com, can provide data. 
However, it's difficult to capture the data (via spreadsheet) for further offline analysis.

[Correction: @PMREdmonton thanks for Zachs.com mention upthread. I hadn't investigated that one before, but it looks like it has some good possibilities, which includes an export to excel feature. thanks.]

Currently, I am using the free finviz.com website to gather US data.
The one thing to keep in mind with a 'free' service, is data integrity. There is no guarantee that the data is 100% accurate.


*2. Canadian coverage*
Most of those US based websites (like finviz.com), has limited, or no TSX data.

Currently, I use the Globe and Mail's Watchlist to capture Canadian stock data.
Once again, with this free service, I need to be aware of potential data issues.


For now, I am satisfied with this 'free' data. I may look into a paid service at some point in the future.


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## Park (Sep 11, 2010)

Thanks for pointing out ycharts.com. However, just like StockScreen123 (affiliated with Portfolio123 I believe), it only covers US stocks. Screener.co covers stocks internationally, including Canadian. I would be interested in knowing of other subscription services, geared towards the retail investor, that cover both the Canadian and US markets.


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## Echo (Apr 1, 2011)

Spidey said:


> One problem with screeners is they can be horribly inaccurate. The TD screener is often not even close to the key ratios and dividends displayed for that stock on their own site. I've posted this complaint on other financial forums and have been told that this is quite common.


I've set up a screener in TDW for the following criteria:

Positive P/E Ratio less than 15
Positive P/Book Ratio less than 1.5
Dividend Yield more than 0%
1-Year Revenue more than $500 Million
5-year dividend growth rate more than 5%
Dividend coverage between 5-95%

I wanted to find Graham-like Canadian dividend stocks. For months it showed no results, but when I tried it yesterday it gave Reitman's as a result. So I looked on Globe Investor, Yahoo and Morningstar and they all show Reitman's with a PE of 21. WTF?


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## physik3r (Sep 10, 2012)

http://www.stockrover.com/ is pretty amazing. Check it out..


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## avrex (Nov 14, 2010)

@physik3r. Thanks for the StockRover recommendation.

*The good. *
There's tons of fundamental data here that you can't find on other websites. Even Canadian TSX tickers. 
The data comes from Morningstar, so I'm assuming there is a high degree of data accuracy.
It's free (well, at least for now.)

*The bad.*
You can't export the data to a spreadsheet. Here is the StockRover FAQ.

Can I print or export the Table?
Our current licensing agreement precludes us from allowing users to export the data in the Table. However you can print data from the table. You can send the data in the table either to a printer or directly to a PDF file.

How much does it cost?
Stock Rover is free. In the near future Stock Rover will evolve to a multi-tiered model where the base level product will continue to be free and the more fully featured versions of Stock Rover will be subscription based.


My suspicion is that once they go subscription based, I may see an 'export' option available for me. 
At that time, I'll determine if the cost is worthwhile.


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## DenisD (Apr 19, 2009)

StockScreen123 has been merged with Portfolio123. Minimum about $500/year, I believe. You can get a free short-term trial account and, after it expires, use some features for free.

StockRover cannot be used to screen for Canadian stocks. If you ask for stocks which trade on Canadian exchanges, it will only return those which do not trade on American exchanges. When I asked them about it, they said they might add that feature to a future release. You can cut and paste data from the print file to a spreadsheet.


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## Park (Sep 11, 2010)

For pay screeners for Canadian stocks, that leaves screener.co. They also have a free short term trial account. My experience with it was favorable.


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## DenisD (Apr 19, 2009)

I've looked at screener.co, briefly. I noticed that there seems to be very little activity in their forum. I wonder how many clients they have. Or, do you see more when you sign up for the free short-term trial?


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## Park (Sep 11, 2010)

My impression, compared to StockScreener123, is that screener.co is not as popular. You can backtest with StockScreener123, whereas you can't with screener.co. The largest group of investors will be American investors, and the advantage of being able to screen nonUS stocks with screener.co is less important to them. Although I am far from an expert on screeners, my impression was that screener.co is the better screener of the two. The major exception, once again, is that you can't backtest with screener.co


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## GoldStone (Mar 6, 2011)

advfn.com is free and covers Canadian stocks. See ca.advfn.com. I don't have much experience with them, so cannot vouch for the accuracy of their data.

Some obvious flaws:
- The UI is definitely on the clunky side. Easily the least usable screener I ever tried.
- They don't clean up outdated tickers. You have to filter on the last trade date to get rid of the acquired, renamed or delisted tickers. The UI to filter on date is barely usable.

On the positive side, the list of screening factors is very long.


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## HaroldCrump (Jun 10, 2009)

Scotia iTrade has recently added a stock screener in their new platform.
I clicked around a couple of times, but didn't use it extensively.
It seems to have most of the basic types of filters and criteria, such as price, volume, market cap, yield, moving average prices, etc.


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## avrex (Nov 14, 2010)

DenisD said:


> StockRover.
> You can cut and paste data from the print file to a spreadsheet.


Thanks for that tip, Dennis. That seems to work.

That bad news. It looks like the 'print capability' is limited to 110 stock tickers.


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## Park (Sep 11, 2010)

Stockguide.ca looks like an excellent screener for Canadian stocks; it's $99/month.


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## My Own Advisor (Sep 24, 2012)

For most of my needs, TMX. Don't really need a screener to know if some CDN stocks are good buys; some have paid dividends for well over 100 years.


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## GalacticPineapple (Feb 28, 2013)

Any preference between Google's stock screener and Zacks's? I did some side-by-side analysis and found they both gave different numbers for almost every metric.

A better question might be - which screener do you think provides more accurate data?


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## Xoron (Jun 22, 2010)

Yahoo has a stock screener that has been around for AGES. (like during the dotcom boom). I used to use it for a while back in the day, but haven't touched it in a few years. It's a Java based app, and *probably *as reliable as the other data on finance.yahoo.com. 

The screener is pretty good, with lots of available data points to screen on. But like the other screeners mentioned here, they also only track the US markets:

http://screener.finance.yahoo.com/newscreener.html


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## liquidfinance (Jan 28, 2011)

I find yahoo useless when it comes to Div yield. Otherwise I like what they offer.


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## bootsnixon (May 10, 2011)

I have tried vectorvest. I don't put much value in their strategies but I find their screener very good. US and CDN, lots of different metrics and has backtesting. $600/yr and up. The more you pay, the more metrics you get as well as real time pricing instead of end of day. Seems pretty user friendly to me. Trying to decide if its worth it.


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## GalacticPineapple (Feb 28, 2013)

bootsnixon said:


> I have tried vectorvest. I don't put much value in their strategies but I find their screener very good. US and CDN, lots of different metrics and has backtesting. $600/yr and up. The more you pay, the more metrics you get as well as real time pricing instead of end of day. Seems pretty user friendly to me. Trying to decide if its worth it.


I'm almost certain that paying money for a stock screener is a poor idea.


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## Pluto (Sep 12, 2013)

I used VectorVest for about a year and an half back in 2008-9. I signed up around September to help me identify market bottom(s) and to help identify what I wanted to buy. I also liked the combination of fundamental and technical indicators. I didn't use their default, or other trading strategies. In that context of extreme fear and selling, I used their sell signals as a contrary indicator, and bought around the times of their maximum number of sell signals. Their default trading system identifies fundamentally good companies in an uptrend and gives those a buy signal. So it will only work in a strong bull market. In a sideways market, blindly following that strategy, one will get whipsawed. In a very serious down market, the maximum number of sell signals is actually a buy signal. They included Canadian stocks. My plan was to buy at or near the bottom, and then gradually sell into the assumed recovery. It worked and Vector Vest helped a lot. By early 2010 I canceled the subscription as I was fully invested and actually starting to sell off what I had bought. In the event of another economic end of the world scenario, I'd be happy with VectorVest again, unless something else came along that looked more appealing. Previously I subscribed to other expensive fundamental and technical analysis services. I looked on it as tuition. There is no substitute for personal experience so I recommend trying whatever tickles your fancy on a monthly basis, then cancel if it doesn't suit you.


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## chris_goulet (Mar 25, 2013)

*Is the ADVFN screener dead?*



GoldStone said:


> advfn.com is free and covers Canadian stocks. See ca.advfn.com. I don't have much experience with them, so cannot vouch for the accuracy of their data.
> 
> Some obvious flaws:
> - The UI is definitely on the clunky side. Easily the least usable screener I ever tried.
> ...


Since December 2013, the ADVFN screener data is out of date! In "Identification & Quote Information", "Trading Date (Latest)" shows "2013/06/13" for all currently trading stocks. The prices, etc... are also out of date. If I click on a symbol in a screener list, that data is up to date. I thought that maybe my free account had expired, so I opened new one, but no luck. I emailed them twice, but no answer.

Their screener WAS great for finding Benjamin Graham value stocks (US markets).

Can someone that has an ADVFN login confirm this please? Thanks!


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## FiveCardCharlie (Feb 10, 2014)

Anyone use StockRover?
It offers both Free and Paid subscriptions. I like it, and use the free version for most of my screens (which aren't many or very complex) but the paid offers more screeners and the ability to see 10yr historical data. If I want to see that I use GOOGLE Finance.


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## avrex (Nov 14, 2010)

*StockRover*

I love StockRover.

In early 2014, StockRover moved to it's paid subscription model. Prior to that, it was all free. 

I was able to create my own quant screeners by picking and choosing which metrics I thought were important/relevant and what weighting I wanted to apply to them. (You cannot do this in the free version.) Plus, StockRover, also has lots of data on Canadian stocks. I think its great.

I find the new $240 annual fee a little high. 
Instead, my plan going forward, is to utilize the $20 monthly membership every once in awhile, to rerun my screens to get updates.


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## avrex (Nov 14, 2010)

*Finviz screener - Bulk export is now Pay*

I will occasionally logon to the Finviz Screener to grab bulk USA stock data.

What was great about this screener, is that I could download a ton of financial metrics for 7000 USA stocks, all in one spreadsheet.
This allowed me to perform all kinds of offline analysis. All of this was free.

However the *Export to spreadsheet* function has changed. Now it directs you to a Pay splash page ($39.95/month, $299.50/year). 

No thanks. I'll continue to use sites like,
*1. *Globe Investor - My Watchlist
*2.* and the above mentioned StockRover (which offers a free and paid model)
for my bulk stock data downloads/analysis.

Both of these sites also give great *Canadian stock* coverage as well.


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## Chris L (Nov 16, 2011)

Google finance does a fine job for free. Just input what you want to watch into the buy and they will tick for you. If you enter buy amounts, etc. it tracks your gains and loses. Works really well, though there is a 20 min delay for CAN stocks. Good enough for me.


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## Richardp (Oct 10, 2014)

I use gurufocus.com, price is around 500 bucks if I remember correctly, you get complete tsx and venture coverage with a great screener, can follow high profile gurus transactions and a visual view for each stock on growth, ratios, financials, 10-y, interactive charts, etc. Helped me a lot and you get interesting screeners like undervalued-predictable companies. I also just subscribe to fast graph but need to get the hang of it before i can comment.


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## alexasmith (Sep 30, 2014)

http://stockcharts.com is good for stock screener, you should try for it.


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## coptzr (Jan 18, 2013)

I definitely always work past the 52wk high-low stuff on first page of any free screener. First thing I do is click 3-5-10-20 year...just nice to see where a company came from.


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