The trading world is a busy place, and there are hundreds of stocks, ETFs and currencies to choose from. It's easy to get overwhelmed by the options out there, but a good stock screener can help you zero in on the best investments.
Smart investors now search for stocks using stock screening services. These services take a mass of stock data and use it to generate lists of potential stocks. The lists can be sorted by a variety of factors, and they're usually free.
In this article, we are going to look at some of the best options available for you so you may want to read on if that’s something you would like to know about.
Top Stock Screeners For Day Traders in 2023
1. Trade Ideas
If you’re thinking about fully automating your trading experience, Trade Ideas is a scanner you should consider. The system comes with a highly advanced tool called Holly that scours the markets for you and presents you with trade alerts right before the trading bells ring.
Not only does it provide you with a real-time feed of data and alerts but it also gives you direct access to Interactive Brokers (IB). So, if you’re signed up with IB you’ll be able to open trades directly from your Trade Ideas account (this can save you some precious micro-seconds).
And to top it all up, Trade Ideas has a good chat room also known as the live trading room. This room has hundreds of live attendees on a daily basis. In our opinion, it is one of the best premium-rated stock chat rooms available out there currently.
The only gripe we have with TI is that its services are quite costly. Complete beginners might struggle to keep up with the subscription costs. But trust us, the hefty sacrifice you make in terms of subscription costs is well worth it.
Why so? Because for years on end, Trade Ideas has always beaten the S&P standard. Yup, when you invest in TI you get an edge over everyone else out there. And that’s not an overstatement – the numbers speak for themselves.
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2. Benzinga Pro
This is your go-to source for investing news and financial data. This proprietary stock screener is the most powerful and intuitive screener on the market and it has helped investors find high-potential stocks to buy, sell or short.
Your stock search includes access to all the major U.S. indices, along with Benzinga Pro's own proprietary trading tools (including a Benzinga/Zacks Rank) that allow you to evaluate stocks in detail before you invest.
The Benzinga Screener can be used as a stand-alone tool or as an additional resource for evaluating new investment opportunities.
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3. FinViz
FinViz has to be one of the most popular online stock trading tools used by professional traders. It provides information on over 7 million stocks available in the US market today.
The best part is that it is free to use. However, it does offer premium accounts for active traders which provide real-time quotes and more advanced features like trade simulation or charting.
This stock screening tool is known for its powerful screening features that allow users to view thousands of stocks at once and quickly sort through them using various parameters like stock price, P/E ratio, EPS growth rate among others.
It also allows you to save your favorite searches and get real time results whenever there is a change in the market. One of the best features of this stock screener is that it allows users to check the current price of a stock against its 52-week high or low price.
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4. Yahoo Finance
This screener will help you find stocks with a high return on equity, low debt-to-equity ratios or trailing 12 month diluted earnings per share growth rates.
It also allows you to look for companies that have increased their dividends over the past year and those that have a price-earnings ratio between 0 and 0.5.
Yahoo's screener also includes filters for sector, market cap, price-to-sales ratio and dividend yield.
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5. Hammerstone Markets
Hammerstone provides a complete suite of solutions that are highly customized to your specific business needs. It is a full-service marketing agency dedicated to taking your brand to new heights.
Ultimately, it was created to help you make more money, save time and increase your profits. It may also interest you to know that there are positive testimonials about it with customers saying they received top-notch service.
Therefore, if you are tired of spending hours looking for data or you are using outdated tools that aren't giving you the information you need, Hammerstone has one of the most advanced tools available in the market today which is used by many fortune 500 companies.
You get to track over 1,000 investment instruments within each tool. If you're looking for a better way to find winning stocks, then this might just be the stock screener you need.
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6. TigerTrade
TigerTrade offers two free screener tools, one for stocks that pay dividends, and another for stocks that meet your preferred criteria.
The "Dividend Yield Search Tool" allows you to look for dividends greater than a certain amount. Type in the rate you want, such as 6%, and it will bring up all companies that pay at least that much dividend per year.
The other tool is called the "Screening Search Tool." This search allows you to choose specific criteria, such as a certain P/E ratio, debt-to-equity ratio or price range.
After that, it will run through a database of thousands of companies and show you all of those that fit your specified requirements.
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7. Morningstar
The Morningstar Stock Screener lets you pick from over 5,000 U.S.-based companies and narrow them down based on their financial characteristics.
You can choose how many companies you want it to display and what financial characteristics you want to see in the results.
It only takes a few seconds to use and doesn't require any registration or signup to use it. This makes it one of the best stock screeners for investors who are not too keen on spending too much time picking stocks.
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8. TradingView
This is one of the best free/paid stock screeners because it's quick and easy to use. To start using the stock screener, just click on "stocks" on the top left menu bar, enter your search term, and click "search".
Once the search result page shows up, you will be able to see a list of all the companies that match your search term. You can further filter your results by industry or market cap.
As soon as you identify a company that meets your requirements, you can view more detailed information such as valuation ratios and financial statements like income statement and balance sheet.
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How Stock Screeners Work
Essentially, stock screeners help you as an investor to pick some of the most promising stocks. For some of these screeners, the lists are generated so quickly that they have to be produced in mass on a set schedule.
Nonetheless, many stock screener services have increasingly sophisticated algorithms that can churn out their lists in real-time, so they can be updated constantly with fresh data.
There are a lot of stock screeners out there — more than you could ever use — but the best ones have proven their ability to consistently deliver high-quality results.
Their algorithms tend to receive more than 100,000 data points per day, which gives them access to fresh information that other services don't have.
Somethings to take note:
- Nothing is perfect. All of these tools have their flaws and quirks -- some more than others. So don't trust them blindly.
- There are way more stock screeners out there than what we will cover in this article so ours is not an exhaustive list - just a good starting point.
- You need to know how to use each tool properly for best results. Don't just run 50 screens and pick one based on its highest "score." Each tool works differently and needs to be used differently for best results.
- Don't forget about fundamentals! Technical analysis only goes so far, so don't forget that there are always fundamentals that need to be considered as well before deciding whether or not to invest in a company.
Features of the Best Stock Screeners
Now, there are numerous stock screeners in the market but not all of them will be worth your time and money. As such, you need to look out for certain features in a stock screener to show you that you are making the right choice.
Now, if you are a long-term investor, the most important features of a good stock screener are those that help you identify stocks with high dividend yields and good earnings growth.
However, if you are interested in short-term trading, it is better to use stock screeners that will allow you to focus on stocks that have performed well recently and that have limited downside risk.
The following list describes some of the characteristics of stock screeners that make them useful for different purposes.
1. Does the Screener Come with a Free Version?
Almost every stock screen tool out there is some sort of freemium model. This is because most investors wouldn’t want to pay for something that will not be worth their while.
As such, it is necessary for a stock screener to come with a free version. Although it gives you limited information about the stocks, you will get an idea about what you will get when you pay for premium tools.
For instance, some stock screeners allow you to view a lot of data on companies and their competitors, but it costs money to see real-time performance data or to export your results in a spreadsheet (which makes it difficult to analyze your results).
2. User Friendliness
The best stock screener should be easy to use, not just for you but for anyone who might want to use it. Most people don't have the skills or patience to wade through complicated options menus and sliders.
If a stock screen tool requires too much effort to set up, then fewer people will bother using it, which defeats the purpose of using a tool in the first place.
3. Parameter Number
The more factors you can filter your results by, the better your chance of finding stocks that fit your investing goals and strategies. At the very least, you should have access to different market caps, price-to-earnings ratios and price ranges.
Creative visualization when it comes to stock picking is very important. You want to be able to see as many potential opportunities as possible.
Nevertheless, you don't want so much information that you get overwhelmed and can't make any decisions.
4. Layout Design
Your eyes shouldn't have to work too hard to find information about each stock on your screen. The easier it is to compare multiple companies at once, the more likely you'll be able to spot patterns and decide which stocks look best.
For instance, a table with clear headings can make all the difference between a good stock and a bad one.
Conclusion
Stock screeners are powerful tools for finding stocks that fit your investment strategy. They help you get past the limitations of searching for stocks with basic criteria, like stock price and market capitalization.
As an investor, you know that screening for stocks is an excellent way to find new investment opportunities. Of course, the process can be extremely cumbersome and time consuming if you do it manually.
However, as you have seen, there are several excellent screeners available on the Internet that make the process much easier. Go ahead and make use of one or several of the ones we have discussed.
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