Starting to understand Stockworm screeners

For a great starting point in understanding our screeners, take a look at this flash tour and then read more, below.

Investors need better stock screeners

Stock screeners are essential tools for investors. This is because stock screeners allow investors to wade through thousands of potential investment choices and return a (hopefully) manageable list of a few stocks for closer analysis.

The problem with traditional screeners is that you have to supply a list of arbitrary conditions (e.g. P/E between 10 and 20, earnings growth greater than 20%, ...) which are used to 'filter' the initial list of stocks into a smaller list. This smaller list could consist of 0 stocks or 100's or 1000's and since there is no best or worst stock in the resulting list you still have to carefully analyze every stock in the list.

Stockworm's stock screeners are revolutionary

Stockworm's stock screeners have received multiple awards including the prestigious Forbes Best of the Web designation for two years running, and have been among Barron's top rated screeners. Why are our screeners so revolutionary? As the table below shows, Stockworm screeners use common investing terms to yield a list of stocks which are ordered from best to worst:

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 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.