whateverworks

This week, my second visit to AOL continued to generate error messages. However trying out the less-publicized screener at ZACKS was a rewarding surprise.
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AOL

AOL's custom stock screener gives you 22 criteria in: Company Basics, Profile, Fundamentals, Performance. You have drop-down choices or you can specify a from-to custom range. It is best to add 1 criterion at a time, otherwise you're likely to get an error message and have no idea which choice caused the error. Unfortunately it will only do 5,000 results and if you are trying 1 criterion at a time can come up with an "over 5,000". error message

When customizing your results view, you can choose any of the categories listed above or show only your selected criteria. To get all the categories you can choose "All"; however this will bring up an error message. Choosing "Basics" also causes an error message. You can choose to sort up or down on any column.

You can see 300 companies at a time per page. There is no way to export the data; so to save it you need to copy and paste into a Notepad file for conversion to a database later.

Searching for microcaps with solid financials and revenue growth brought up a huge number of banks and other financial companies. Out of 123 screened microcap prospects there were only 21 non-financial. My non-microcap screening, also, contained many financial companies.
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ZACKS

Zacks screener offers 84 criteria in the categories:Company Descriptors, Ownership, Pricing ChangesRating Changes, Industry RankValuations, EPS Surprises, Estimate Uncertainty, Growth, P/E Ratios, Fundamentals, EPS Actual and Dates, EPS Est. Annual, EPS Est. Quarterly, Pricing Info., Miscellaneous.

It is not surprising that the Zacks screener employs many figures from analyst predictions because that's the focus of their Website. However, there are plenty of other variables to make the screener usable with my criteria.

I suggest choosing your criteria a few at a time. You will not get error messages but, as with most screeners, it is easy to simply eliminate everybody very quickly. Especially when lookning at microcaps, the many "NAs" will discard companies you may want. Zacks screener is especially useful because, as you add each criterion, it tells you how many stocks will remain when you run the screen! Zacks also makes it easy for you to delete any choices that unexpectedly wipe out most of your group.

When you run your screen, you can see the results with as many of the criteria as you like, even all 84. Although there is not an easy way to export, all the results show on one page, even if there are hundreds or thousands; so it is relatively easy to copy and paste into Notepad for future conversion to a database.

Zacks has 4184 stocks with $250M market cap or smaller; so is another good resource for my MagicMicrocaps Fund.
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This concludes my review of the free customizable stock screeners available on the Web. If I discover more I'll do a follow-up.

Comments: View Comments |  Tuesday October 30, 2007