What a screener is for

A stock screener is a filter. It starts with the full universe of listed stocks and removes anything that does not meet a set of conditions, leaving a shortlist that is small enough to look through one by one. The screener above operates on the US market by default, with the most-capitalised stocks at the top, and exposes the full set of fundamental and technical filters in the toolbar.

A screener does not identify "good" stocks. It identifies stocks that match a definition. Whether that definition is useful is the reader's call.

Common starting points

A few combinations of filters tend to come up over and over. They are starting points, not endpoints.

• Large-cap blue chips. Market cap above a chosen threshold (often 10 billion or 50 billion), positive net income, and listed on a major exchange. Filters out micro-caps and unprofitable names.
• Value-style screen. Low price-to-earnings ratio, low price-to-book, dividend yield above a floor, debt-to-equity below a ceiling. Returns mature, slow-growing, cash-generating businesses — and also genuine "value traps" that are cheap because something is wrong.
• Growth-style screen. Revenue growth above a threshold over the last few years, high gross margin, positive earnings growth. Returns scaling businesses that may already be priced for it.
• Dividend screen. Yield above a floor, payout ratio below a ceiling, history of paying dividends without cutting. Useful for income-focused screens, with the caveat that an unusually high yield often signals a falling share price rather than a generous policy.
• Technical screen. Stocks above their 50-day and 200-day moving averages, with rising relative strength. Returns names with current momentum but says nothing about whether that momentum is justified.

Filter categories on this screener

The toolbar above groups filters into a few buckets. Most readers only need a handful at once.

• Identification — exchange, sector, industry, country. The right place to start when narrowing the universe.
• Size and liquidity — market capitalisation, average daily volume, share price. Useful for excluding names that are too thinly traded to be practical.
• Performance — daily, weekly, monthly and year-to-date change. Good for spotting movers; less good as a fundamental filter on its own.
• Valuation — P/E (trailing and forward), P/B, P/S, EV/EBITDA, dividend yield. The columns most commonly used in value-oriented screens. The fundamentals primer goes into what each one means.
• Profitability and growth — operating margin, return on equity, revenue growth, EPS growth. Useful for separating businesses that compound capital from those that consume it.
• Balance sheet — debt-to-equity, current ratio, cash per share. Quick health check on financial leverage and short-term solvency.
• Technicals — RSI, MACD signals, moving-average position, distance from 52-week high or low. Covered in the indicators primer.

Common mistakes

Three patterns tend to produce misleading shortlists.

• Too many filters at once. Stacking ten conditions almost always produces a list of one or two oddities, none of which are interesting for the reason intended. Three to five filters is usually enough.
• Forgetting why a metric is low. A P/E of 4 looks cheap; a cyclical company at the top of its earnings cycle is usually about to look much less cheap. Pair valuation filters with at least one growth or profitability check.
• Ignoring the universe definition. A screen that includes ADRs, foreign listings, OTC tickers and special-purpose vehicles will return names that are not directly comparable to a domestic blue-chip list. Use the exchange and country filters to keep the universe coherent.

From shortlist to research

The screener's job ends once the list is short enough to read. Each name on it is a hypothesis that needs checking — what the business actually does, how it makes money, whether the latest filings agree with the metrics in the row, and whether anything in the news feed contradicts the picture. Click any symbol to open its dedicated ticker page, where the chart, profile, fundamentals, technical signals and news for that company are gathered in one place.

For background reading on what the columns mean and how the underlying data is presented, the Learn section covers charts, fundamentals, indicators, and how ticker symbols and exchanges fit together. None of it is investment advice — see the disclaimer for the boundary between explanation and recommendation.

Last reviewed on 2026-04-27.