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Desperate Housewives - Episode Five

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Here are 3 more free custom stock screeners which, although not as comprehensive as Yahoo and Microsoft Money, reviewed previously, each has a unique focus and a decent number of criteria to choose from.

CNBC SCREENER
CNBC has many of choices in the categories: Company Overview, Performance, Growth Trends, Valuation, Mangement Efficiency, Analyst Estimates, Financial Strengths, Current Financials, Dividends. You can use the logical operators: Greater Than, Greater Than / Equal To, Less Than, Less Than / Equal To, Equal To, Between. If you do not like to use an operator and a value, you can choose the "button view" to make a choice on a 5 point ranking from hi to lo.

There are 10282 stocks included and, good news for my microcap fund screening, these include 6187 under 300 market cap. A fair number of these companies and funds are on Canadian exchanges. There are 3 results views: Overview, Performance, Earnings. You can view 25 at a time and export 100 at a time.

The results can be a bit squirrily. For example, I screened with only one criterion: "Net income TTM greater than $0 Million" and got only 666 matches. Trying a very small fraction of a million resulted in the same thing. Now. I don't believe that there are only 666 companies in the US who are profitable. When I screened with the sole criteria "EPS ttm greater than 0" I got 5,565 matches. That's more like it. I am guessing that this screener does not have TTM figures for all companies and eliminates companies with an NA (not available).

The really bad news is that the darned software periodically resets everything back to zero! I could not find any reason for this. Could the Website be constantly updating for new data from around the world and refreshing ALL page views when this happens? As a result, this tool is almost impossible to use. A great pity because potentially this is a really good screener. I'm hoping this is a temporary bug and will try the screener again later.
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MARKETWATCH SCREENER
With Marketwatch's customizable Intraday Stock Screener you can find stocks using as many or as few of the following parameters as you wish to define.

PRICE Show me stocks:
--Trading from $ ___ to ___ per share
--up / down in price by ___ % or more during: 5 Minutes; 15 Minutes; 1 Hour; Today's Session
--trading below 52 week low / above 52 week high
VOLUME Show me stocks:
--with a current trading volume between ___ and ___ shares
--producing block trades of ___ during: 5 min; 15 min; Hour; Today's Session
FUNDAMENTALS Show me stocks:
--with a P/E ratio from ___ to ___
--with a market capitalization from ___ mil. $ to ___ mil.$
TECHNICALS Show me stocks:
--that are currently outperforming / underperforming their 50 day / 200 day day moving average that are outperfoming / underperforming the market index chosen by ___% (DJIA; Nasdaq Composite; Russell 2000; DJ Internet Index)
EXCHANGE & INDUSTRY Show me stocks:
--trading on only the following exchanges: All; NYSE; NASDAQ; AMEX
--classified in one of the following Dow Jones Industry group: (many industries listed)

You can view up to 100 results at a time and the results page can contain: Company Name; Symbol; Price; Last Trade Time; Change; Change %; 52-Week Low; Volume; P/E Ratio; Market Cap; More Info. (ie. link to chart; link to news). There's no way to export to the data other than copy and paste into Notepad.

As you can see, this may be a great screener for people who like momentum trading and technical analysis but it is not usable for my detailed screening on fundamentals. Also, when it comes to my microcaps fund it offers only 588 stocks with 300 Mil. Mkt. Cap. and below.

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NASDAQ SCREENER
Thank goodness, the NASDAQ screener is very usable and covers all active stocks, not just those on NASDAQ. For example if you choose "Pink Sheets" under Stock Market you get 1407 companies. You get 6195 companies when specifying $300 mil. or less market cap.

For each criterion you fill in a figure for "low" and one for "high". I think that to save time if you fill in a "low", you can leave the "high" blank to count as infinite (and vice versa); however I can't be sure this works in all cases.

I counted 45 total choices in the categories: Company Basics, Technical Analysis, Fundamentals, Ratios and Stock Market.

The results page shows figures for all the criteria you have screened on. (I don't know if it will take all 45 at once.) If you want to see figures for a criterion you haven't screened on, just screen from 0 to 1 billion (or trillion, or whatever). A word of warning, though -- an NA (not available) seems to keep a company from showing up! So, if you fill in ALL unused criteria with 0 to 1 trillion to get all available information, you probably eliminate everybody instead. Handling an "NA" is a common problem with most screeners.

The one negative: you can't export the results. However, unlike other screeners, all the resulting companies show up on one page, even if there are hundreds or thousands of them! Therefore, it is easy to to copy and paste results into a Notepad file (which with a bit of work can eventually be converted into a database).

Using the NASDAQ screen I found a couple of "maybes" to look at for my small stocks fund. Virco Manufacturing Corp. (VIRC) looks good but is in retail (a business furniture company). I expect retail sales in general to be flat in the coming year. ATRION Corp. (ATRI) looks good and is in the medical & healthcare industry; however the stock has been a roller coaster.

Late Addition: Searching medium/larger companies for the StrategyLab Fund, the NASDAQ screen came up with a group in which 2 companies haven't done badly in the recent bear market weeks: WD 40 (WDFC) and Watson Wyatt Worldwide (WW). Neither of them are up as much lately as the microcaps, VIRC and ATRI.

For my purposes, the biggest lack in the NASDAQ screener is the inability to search on revenue (top line) growth and stock price growth.
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NEXT: I had planned to review AOL's screener, here, but substituted NASDAQ because I ran into error messages with AOL. I hope this was temporary and will try to review AOL later.