Any recommnedations for really good stock screeners?
Free - I now use Google Finance exclusively. Yahoo Java was OK too.
Paid (not by me :-)) - ValueLine was really good when I could access it through my local library. Highly recommended if you live in US - check with your local library. I still get 10-15 stock ideas and then visit the library on the weekend to read the ValueLine paper reports. Our library stopped the electronic subscription and I am too cheap to dole out $1000/year just for stock screening.
Brokerage - at various times in my life I’ve used Datek (now Ameritrade), Schwab, Fidelity and Vanguard; I thought Fidelity’s was by far the best. I love the ability to check specific securities against your screen to see why they didn’t make the cut. E.g. you screen for low P/E and low debt and low P/B and you expect CPB to be in there but you don’t find it. So you can see why it didn’t make the cut - higher P/B and debt than you expected. Strange. It should be a value stock. So now you go to Yahoo finance or whatever and find out that it’s because of stock buybacks (with price above book value.) CPB is really a value stock disguised as a growth (or at least a high P/B) stock.
google does everything…from internet navigation, cars, phones, fiber cable, glasses, stock screeners, travel agencies, video streaming (youtube), social websites, email, maps etc…
I use stock screens occasionally --either Bloomberg or FactSet, though Google Finance is also solid too.
The thing to note is that any screen only captures the current moment in time, unless you compare what that screen looked like several weeks or months ago. The point of doing this is to help you understand how investor sentiment or fundamentals have changed, and ideally you want to be following or screening these stocks long enough to know when to pounce once the valuation looks good. So for me, I don’t have a bloated screen that just tracks stocks based on multiples – there are a set number of stocks (several dozen) that I track over the long haul and look at what they’re doing every day, and in time I can then determine whether a stock is relatively overvalued or undervalued.
Have you ever compared GOOG to MSFT? I don’t know how old you are, but I’m only 23. So I’m really too young to know for certain, but I’m given the impression MSFT was doing all these things as well. Wonder if GOOG will end up spreading itself too thin.
There is FINVIZ.com, but I have to give it a thumbs-down because of data quality issues. For example, you can screen for price-to-book, but that comes out wrong because apparently preferred equity is mistakenly included in the denominator, but obviously not in the numerator. I don’t know who runs that site, but I never got a response from them.