Stock Screening

So you want to start screening stocks on your own and you don’t want to spend money on your own software and database management. The best and easiest solution is with Microsoft’s Money Screener. It is one of the great free values on the web and an excellent tool for stock searches.

The Screener is a powerful database that lets you view and sort more than 16,000 stocks and funds on the basis of about 800 statistical characteristics. It can be found at:

 http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/finder/customstocks.asp.

After getting use to its interface, it is a snap to find stocks using different criteria and to export the search list to a text file or to Excel for further study. Also, once you have created just the right search, you can save it and run it again later.

Not sure where to start, try one of our pre-defined power search.

High Relative Strength – High Growth

Breakout Candidates

Dog’s of the Dow

We will in the future, post screens that you can adapt to your own use.

If you have a favorite stock and want to find out the fundamental and technical characteristics that make it a great stock, try their Investment Matcher: http://moneycentral.msn.com/investor/finder/matcher.asp

It is a quick and handy way to find companies with similar market cap, average daily volume, price-to-sales ratio, and other specific criteria. It matches companies that are as close as possible in market capitalization, average daily volume, price-to-sales ratio, price-to-sales ratio relative to industry, one-year-revenue growth, one-year price strength relative to all stocks, six-month price change and ratio of current price to 52-week high. We limit the search to stocks that have traded for at least 12 months.