Your Next Great Stock: How to Screen the Market for Tomorrow's Top Performers

Chapter 10. Things You Can Screen For

In this chapter we'll look at individual clues and what they say about companies. These are the clues made up of the raw financials we looked at in Chapter 9, and collections of these clues will make up the strategies explained throughout the rest of the book.

Most of these clues say good things about stocks. Some say indifferent but nonetheless useful things. If these measures are new to you, don't become overwhelmed by the number of them. You won't have to use all of them. The best strategies are based on just a few of them. You can skim through this section now and use it later while you screen as a reference.

Company Descriptions

These are mostly useful for selecting the universe of stocks you want to search through in your screen.

Ticker Symbol

The symbol a stock trades under is the ticker symbol. Use this if you want to run a screen for a single stock you're interested in researching, and then generate a report on that stock with all the data points you care to include.

Country of Domicile

This is where a company is headquartered. Use it to search for foreign stocks, but be aware that some companies base themselves in tax-friendly countries but do most of their business elsewhere. If you live in the United States and you want to buy foreign stocks to diversify a portfolio of mostly U.S. ones, it does little good to buy shares of a Bermuda-based company that collects 85 percent of its sales in the United States.

Sector

The sector is the area of ...