Online Investing Hacks

Weed Out Results

Because stock screens blindly follow the criteria tests and cut-off values you specify, they can omit companies that almost meet your criteria. By using looser screening criteria, you’ll end up with more results, but you can use Excel or online features to compare financial measures and then decide for yourself which companies to keep. Downloading screen results to a spreadsheet gives you the most flexibility, because you can bring all of Excel’s features into play to evaluate your contestants. However, if you use Quicken.com’s stock screens, the Compare Stocks feature displays the financial measures for all the screen results in a table on the Web.

If you download results data to a spreadsheet, be sure to display all the columns of data you want to evaluate before you create the spreadsheet. Whether you use the MSN Money Deluxe Screener [Hack #5] , the Reuters Investor Power Screener, or another stock screen that downloads results, add, remove, or rearrange columns in the results on the web page. For example, using the MSN Money Deluxe Screener, you choose View→Column Set Displayed→Customize Column Set on the screener’s menu bar. Then, you can select columns and click Add, Remove, Move Up, or Move Down to modify the columns in your results.

Tinkering with Results in a Spreadsheet

With the data for the companies that pass your criteria stored in a spreadsheet, you can sort and filter based on any of the data in the spreadsheet with much more flexibility than that ...