Your Next Great Stock: How to Screen the Market for Tomorrow's Top Performers

Chapter 8. The Screeners

The perfect stock-screening tool doesn't exist, but if it did it would have these six attributes:

1. It would be easy to use. You wouldn't have to read instructions to get started.

2. It would let you search for anything. If you can think of a company attribute, and if the data for it are out there, the perfect stock screener would let you search for it.

3. It would let you tinker with the results. You'd be able to sort the stocks that come up on your screens any way you like, make reports on them, download those reports, and so on.

4. It would be stable. The software would never freeze up on you.

5. It would never make mistakes. The data you search through would be reliable.

6. It would be free. Paying for stuff isn't as fun as not paying for stuff.

Screeners that (Mostly) Deliver

In this chapter we'll look at the screeners that come closest to delivering on all of these things. These are listed alphabetically. I'll tell you what each screener's strong points are and what its weaknesses are. I'm covering only screeners that range in price from free to $100 a month. That's a reasonable price range, I think, viewed next to the prospect of finding great stocks. Also, I'm excluding screeners that are available only to institutional customers and not to individual investors. After looking at all the screeners, I'll give my top recommendations.

American Association of Individual Investors ($21 a Month)

This site, www.aaii.com, is plenty useful for those with an interest in stock screening. ...