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 are patent pending, have been awarded 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:

approach	traditional	Stockworm
starting point	thousands of stocks	thousands of stocks
you supply the following input	multiple arbitrary 'filters' (e.g. P/E between 10 and 20, earnings growth greater than 20%, buy-strong buy analysts ratings)	your investing preferences, in human terms (e.g. "low P/E", "high earnings growth", "good analysts' ratings")
number of stocks returned by screen	unknown (could be 0, could be hundreds or thousands)	exactly the number that you request (the default is 32 stocks)
order of the results	arbitrary	results are ordered from the best to the worst, based on your investing preferences

Stockworm screener types

Stockworm supports 3 screener types: Fundamental, Signal, and Similar. The manual has details on all of these screeners, but we'll just briefly describe some features of Stockworm screens here. The Fundamental screen allows you to screen any data within our database using human legible terms. The fundamental screener has several presets (Quick, Standard, Charts, and Mixed) which focus on subsets of our database which appeal to certain investment styles (the fundamental screener with the 'mixed' settings is shown below).

The Signal screen allows you to find stocks with most recently issued 'buy' or 'sell' trading signals.

The Similar screen is a conceptually different screening type. This screen returns stocks which are 'similar' to an inputted list of stocks. The Similar screen 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).

Stockworm screeners have expert options including backtesting

All Stockworm screeners have expert options which allow the specification of price limits, industry groups, backtesting options, and the number of stocks returned by the screen.

A custom filter is provided which allows you to specify a formula for your investing criteria like: INSTITUTE > AVG(INSTITUTE) (institutional ownership must be greater than the market average institutional ownership).

Backtesting involves running a screen using data from the past (e.g. six months or three years ago) and seeing how the stocks which would have been picked actually did. If the backtesting shows that the stocks which your screener picked would have done well, then you have found good screen settings. If the stocks would have performed poorly, you might reconsider your screen settings.

Screener results are presented as report cards

All screener results are presented as a list of 'report cards'. These report cards are ordered from the best to the worst match to your screen settings and include a percentage score based upon your settings (located in the upper right hand corner of the card). The report cards display a number of critical pieces of information for each stock and they offer links for a more in-depth analysis.