Stock Research Tools - Stock Screeners

When you have to select among the myriads of stock alternatives you may feel lost and confused. The stock investment field is full of investment solutions, so you have to make many researches on their annual reports, 10-Qs and many other financial indicators. This will cause you to lose much valuable time, which may cost you money. You can also use the services of a broker, who will require you to pay a commission when you start to trade with the chosen stocks.

Your work is further complicated if you have selected several stock investment candidates and have to compare them.

However, in order to avoid all of this tedious work you can select from a number of research tools, which are available over the Internet and most of the time are free of charge or in return to a small fee. The ones that are quite complicated and provide sophisticated services will require you to pay a fee in return to the service. On the other hand, you can go by paying a modest subscription fee and use some the basic tools required to make a simple analysis.

The one that we highly recommend is the stock screener. This research tool provides you with an automatic exposure of desired companies by predetermined criteria. It displays companies very quickly, which saves you a lot of time if you have decided to do the research by yourself. The good news is that most of the stock screeners come for free. Despite this, there are some more sophisticated ones that require you to subscribe for a fee. However, for beginning we recommend to use the free ones because you can study them thoroughly without having to pay high bills for their use. In this way you will get used to the way stock screeners work and can move to a more sophisticated stock screener with higher confidence.

How Stock Screeners Work?

When you decide on the investment in stocks you target companies that meet certain criteria. So, stock screeners allow you to select from a list of criteria (e.g. market cap, sales, industry type, and etc.). The more complicated the stock screener, the more criteria you can choose from.

Once you have entered the criteria that the companies have to meet, the stock screener automatically filters the companies that are listed on the major stock exchanges. After this you are displayed a list of companies that meet the qualifiers. If the list is not narrow enough you can revise the criteria in order to reduce the size of the list.

After you test several stock screeners you will see that they are very similar to one another. However, you should be clear what exactly you want from such a research tool, so that you can get the best of it.

Finally, by using a stock screener you significantly reduce the time for research and analysis. Yet, keep in mind that it should not be the only tool on which to base your decisions.

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For knowledge we can highly recommend you subscribe to the The Wall Street Journal.

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