Online Investing Hacks

Fast and Free Stock Screening Tools

Narrowing the stock field down to a handful of attractive candidates is easy with many of the online stock screening tools.

With over 10,000 publicly held companies available as investments, you need some help whittling the field down to a few companies for further study. Many companies aren’t good investments. Some don’t grow enough. Some don’t grow at all. Others are growing, but cost too much to offer you a sufficient investment return. Others are growing and reasonably priced, but too risky for your peace of mind. Weeding out all these companies typically narrows your candidates significantly. In addition, you can narrow the field further if you’re looking for companies in specific industries or with a particular market capitalization to satisfy your portfolio diversification objectives [Hack #74] . It doesn’t do much good to identify desirable characteristics, unless there’s an easy way to filter the list for stocks that possess those features. Fortunately, that’s exactly what stock screening does, and free stock screening tools abound on the Web.

Stock screening tools are black and white. When you define a criterion, a company either meets it or doesn’t. For example, if you screen for EPS growth rate of greater than 15 percent, a company growing at 14.9 percent won’t show up. Overly rigorous screening criteria might weed out companies that you should consider. One way to correct this failing is to adjust your criteria until the screen ...