Online Trading Website

Stock screener methods are used by individual and institutional traders to narrow a large world of companies to discover ones matching specific rules. This article gives information on features to look for in such a tool.

Looking from the trader’s perspective the primary usage of a stock screener is to find those companies that satisfy a specific pre-defined set of criteria.  These factors may be related to fundamental financial data about the company, such as liquidity ratios or quarterly growth in debts.  It may also be based on technical price information, for instance percentage price growth over the last 30 days, or highest buying and selling volume over 5 million shares. Finally, the filter may be centered on technical indicators which include stochastics, CCI, ADX and many more.

One thing you ought to look for is whether or not the stock screener handles all the data needed at the detail level you need.  In order to screen by fundamental performance information, for example, you need to make certain that the total financial statement data is available for every stock for the last 3 years. Likewise, if you want to screen by trading values then those values must be computed using price-volume data with plenty of past history available for the calculations.  If you must have annual, daily, or even hourly data it must be available in the application to perform the filtering operation.

Then, consider how the stock screener allows you to set up filters and rules.  The filter screen can include check boxes,drop down lists, or free text mechanisms.  Is it necessary to become familiar with a special language or a script syntax? Is it in normal language that’s easy to understand, or do you have to be a software coder?  Is it easy to simple and combination rules?  Can you combine rules like price above Bollinger band and moving average turning up or weekly open less than weekly close and weekly close greater than close 10 weeks ago?  Can you save and group the rules and filters?  This amount of functionality lets you do sophisticated screening based on many different approaches to identify excellent opportunities for investing or trading.

Finally, is the software interface simple to use and fun to work with?  Is it possible to find the information you want rapidly?  Can you create new filters easily?  Can you drill down to the fundamental data? Can you save the results and data into text or Excel format?  These features really help with efficiency.

A sophisticated stock screener with proper access tools to capture information from publicly traded stocks worldwide is a highly useful tool for both solo investors and institutional investors.