The failure of traditional screeners

Screeners are supposed to find stocks which match your vision of what a good (or bad) stock looks like. In practice, traditional screeners fail miserably at this goal. This is because traditional screeners are composed of a series of "filters" which take the list of potential stock picks and reduce the list based on whether or not the remaining stocks in the list satisfy the criteria:

The problem with this process is that you are forced to translate concepts like "low price-to-earnings ratio", "high earnings growth" into a series of arbitrary ranges like "p/e < 20", "earnings growth > 20%", etc. There is no guarantee that the resultant stocks truly represent your investing concepts in the current market (maybe a low p/e ratio is truly 20 or maybe it is 10 or 30 in the current market) and there is no guarantee as to the number of stocks which are returned by the screener (anywhere from 0 stocks to the entire market).

Stockworm stock screeners are powerful and flexible!

Stockworm's powerful, flexible stock screeners are award winning because our stock screeners overcome the limitations of traditional screeners by taking all of your investing requirements (in human terms like "high earnings growth") and blending them to return to you only the best stocks:

Of course, our screeners still support traditional screener features so that, for example, you can isolate your results to small market capitalization stocks or to a desired price range.

Stockworm screener rules

The Stockworm stock screener operates by assembling a series of rules which define the set of stocks which you are seeking. These rules are identical to those used with autoinvestor strategies, with the exception that some rules which are only relevant to portfolio management, are excluded from the screeners. These rules may be:

• fundamental - Sort rules and filter rules expose every fundamental parameter in our database and even include a few pre-computed technical parameters (e.g. the ratio of price to the 50 day ema of price).
• trading signals - Trading signal rules allow you to screen for stocks which have technical trading signals in a 'buy' or 'sell' state. You can customize the trading signal, the timing of the buy or sell signal, and a few other parameters.
• similar - Similar rules allow you to order stocks by 'similarity' to an inputted list of stocks. The similar screener can be used for portfolio matching (e.g. type in your current portfolio holdings and find other stocks which match your investing style), or stock profiling (e.g. find stocks which have a similar financial profile to AT&T).
• other - filters on the final result count, the industries included, market index membership, etc.

The Stockworm screeners have expert options which allow the backtesting of screeners and the entry of notes.

It is important that we continue to emphasize that you should choose the right 'tool' for the right job. Screeners are used to generate a list of stocks which match your desired investing criteria on a specified day. Screeners are NOT associated with a portfolio and therefore do not provide buy, sell or hold recommendations based upon the screener results -- if you are seeking this functionality, please use an autoinvestor strategy.

Screener list

When you visit the screener section of the investing strategies tab, you will see a list of all of your custom screeners ('my screeners') followed by tabs for the Stockworm and Community screeners. You can run (screen), rename, delete or share your screeners with the stockworm community. You can sort also the "my screeners" list by name, type or date modified, or view any screener by clicking on the screener name: