Stock screeners
“Advanced” features

Once you find stock screeners with your personal “must have” features, the benefits associated with the nice to have and advanced features can make a difference. Take into account your personal preferences as well.

Remember, screeners are stock screening tools and you are looking for the best tool for the job.

Advanced features

The following are often consider advanced – unless you need them and understand them

• Proprietary rating/ranking system – many screeners (MSN Deluxe, Morningstar, ValueLine and Zachs for example) provide proprietary ranking systems that may improve the performance of your strategies.  This is a good example of saving extra data with your results since it may not be possible for you to obtain the current rating some time in the future.
• Backtesting – even if only 1 or 2 years of data are available for backtesting, this is a convenient way to examine the recent performance of your strategies.  Check for survivorship bias.
• Custom formulas – if the exact data point you are interested in is not available, it may be possible to generate it from other data if you can create a calculation.
• Importing a list of stock tickers – if you use multiple screeners, importing a list of tickers to get a special rating value or data point is a plus.  Importing ticker lists relieves the tedium of entering the symbols manually.
• Advanced logic – screeners default to “AND” logic.  This means that all conditions you specify must be met.  Suppose you want to screen for stocks with either a PE ratio less than one “OR” a Price/Sales ratio less than one.  “AND” logic screens will provide only stocks with both conditions – not what you were looking for.  Some stock screeners provide “OR” logic which allows either condition (or both) to be met.  Custom formulas can sometimes accomplish the same thing.
• Portfolio screening – this is an extension of importing stock tickers.  If you can create a portfolio or custom basket of stocks you should be able to run a screen against the portolio. For example, if you use folioFN and only want to consider stocks available for window trades, you should import that list of tickers and run your screen against that list

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