Stock Screener: A Valuable Investment Tool?

Stock screening and the use of a stock screener are a must for investments. Before the Internet and the use of stock screeners, researching stocks and stock screening had to be done through the advice of a stock broker who was only paid only when you bought and sold stocks or you had to do your own form of tedious stock research, like manually going through a pile of paperwork of annual reports, 10-Qs, and an assortment of documents that were out-dated by the time you received them.

Performing investment research on more than a few companies without the use of a stock screener was almost impossible unless you had a staff of stock market analysts working for you. Stock screening by doing stock market comparisons on several companies was tedious and difficult.

Stock screeners became a godsend among the investment research community when it became available online.

Today, any investor can access powerful stock screening tools, such as a stock screener and many of the stock screeners on the Internet are free. Of course, there are some very sophisticated stock screener tools that come with hefty price tags; however, for most investors all the stock screener and stock screening research tools they?ll need is free or available for a modest subscription.

Stock Screener

The most common and useful research tool for investment research is the stock screener. The stock screener is handy program does stock screening research in a blink of an eye what would take you hours and hours of research by hand to do ? and best of all, there are many stock screeners on the Internet free for you to use. Some of the better stock screeners come as part of subscription packages to the better investment research sites, but you can get a feel for how the stock screeners work for free.

The concept of the stock screener is simple. You want to identify stocks that meet certain criteria. (Coincidentally, this is how you go about building a stock portfolio, rather than hastily investing in whatever stock looks good at the moment.)

Stock screening programs allow you to enter qualifiers such as industry type, market cap, sales, dividends, and so forth. The more sophisticated the stock screening, the larger number of qualifiers.
After you put in all the qualifiers, the stock screener looks at all the companies listed on the major exchanges and pulls out those that meet your qualifications. You get a list of the companies. If the list is too large, you can run the stock screener again with tighter qualifications to reduce the number of hits.

The more sophisticated stock screeners allow you to run further stock screening on the set you just generated, while the free stock screener tends to leave you with just the list. Either way, you have just saved yourself hours and hours of work by narrowing down the possible candidates.

Zacks.com Stock Screener and Stock Screening Tools

One simple and easy to use stock screener comes from Zacks.com. Despite its simplicity, this stock screener yields some powerful results. Zacks.com offers a Custom Stock Screener, Predefined Stock Screener, Mutual Fund Screener and Research Wizard for stock screening. All these stock screening tools are powerful, robust and very easy to use.

The stock screener options offered from Zacks.com give you easy-to-read results which can quickly be sorted according to your stock screening preferences. Use specific data in the stock screener to find thousands of stocks and narrow them down to a handful of powerful winners. The Zacks stock screener tools are proven and very useful to get you started in stock screening.

After using the free custom stock screener or predefined stock screener, try the Research Wizard which will not only give you more stock screening tools, but will give you another set of customized tools for picking stocks and monitoring your portfolio. The Research Wizard comes with over a dozen stock picking strategies that have performed in both up and down stock markets. You will also get a free Zacks report: Top 10 Stock Screening Strategies. Also, available is a free Mutual Fund Screener that works much like the stock screener with the ability to customize you criteria and preferences.

Many look and work very much alike, but you need to know what you are looking for and what you need to ask from the stock screener before they can be of real benefit. The great thing about using the free stock screeners like this one from Zacks.com is you can spend all the time you need experimenting and testing without running up a big bill. You can also save your stock screening favorites again and again.

A stock screener is just one investment research tool; however, they should be the first tool you master as you begin learning to do stock market and investment research. You should be using a stock screener to help you select winning investment candidates.



Zacks.com Stock Screener and Stock Screening Tools