Online Stock Screener — Finding Stocks That Match Your Tastes

With over 10,000 stocks traded in the U.S. alone, finding ones that match your particular criteria is going to be very hard .... unless you have some smart way of sorting through or "screening" these stocks.

An Online Stock Screener is just the tool you need to get through this seemingly laborious task. Let's first look at what these screeners are.

What are Stock Screeners?

They are software tools that let you input variables to screen stocks. Based on these inputs, they have an "engine" that works behind the scenes and plows through the companies stored in the screener's database to find ones that match the variables you specified.

Most screeners are online stock screeners — they are web-based and don't require offline installation, making them very convenient to use.

How do we use Stock Screeners?

In this section, we will show you how to use what we consider the best available online stock screeners. We will introduce you to each screener and provide examples to help you understand better.

An important note: Our examples will all use criteria that are based on our style of investing — Fundamental Analysis.

Let's take a look at some of our favorite stock screening tools:

FREE

The best online screeners that are free to use are:

• Morningstar Stock Screener: The free version of the Morningstar stock screener offers a decent selection of variables to screen stocks with. In fact, the choice of variables is much more than most of the other free screeners.

  Since Morningstar essentially uses a fundamental approach to selecting stock, it is not surprising that most of the screening variables offered focus on solid fundamental criteria.

• MSN Stock Screener: MSN Money, until Nov. 4th, 2009, had an extremely versatile and user-friendly stock screener that allowed you to pick stocks based on several criteria.

  The current version is fairly basic, but a good place to start. MSN Money also offers what they call "predefined stock screens" — screens based on popular Fundamental and Technical criteria already entered.

• Yahoo Stock Screener: Yahoo finance offers a fairly basic screener. The program is easy to use — it's basically a series of pull-down menus to make your selection for each variable/criteria. The number of variables offered is, in our opinion, rather limited.

• CNBC Stock Screener: CNBC offers you the choice of customizing your own screen or using one of their predetermined screens. This is a fairly good place to do basic stock screening.

PAID

• Morningstar Premium Stock Screener: The Premium Stock Screener offered by Morningstar is the Cadillac of fundamental screeners. The vast choice of variables to use in the screening process makes this a very powerful screening tool.

To wrap up, an online stock screener is a very useful tool that makes the search for stocks matching your criteria very easy. You will find yourself using these tools often once you start picking your own stocks .... or, shall we say, "investing independently."

Please subscribe to our Free Newsletter for great tips on how to get started and learn to invest by yourself.

Return from Online Stock Screener page to Independent Stock Investing home page