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Desperate Housewives - Episode Three

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(Previously: Although the Morningstar screens did not produce the kind of results I wanted, I did find Freeport McMoran Copper and Gold (FCX) for the Strategy Lab fund.)

I had much better luck with Yahoo's new Java-based custom stock screen with over 150 criteria. The main search categories are: Descriptive, Share Performance, Trading & Volume, Valuation, Analyst Estimates, Ownership, Dividends, Margins, Balance Sheet, Income Statement, Profitability, Growth and Cash Flow.

For each criterion you can search with "Between", =>, or <=. Although you cannot type in the value to search on, the drop-down menu gives you logical choices. For example, I can choose "Market Cap. <= 250" in order to find prospects for my MagicMicroCaps fund. If I want to extend my search to a Market Cap of 300 I have to select the next highest dropdown choice of 500. However, the results page allows me to sort ascending or descending on each criterion; therefore I can sort by market cap and easily ignore the companies which are too large.

The results page shows you the criteria you have searched on. Will the results page show all 150+? Maybe not; however I did not run into problems. Plus, My results showed ROE, ROA and Forward P/E even when I did not search on those figures. I did not do enough experiments to see if it always gives you that extra information or if it depends on your search choices. In addition you want to see figures which are not part of your screen, you can always search on => (or <=) and choose the lowest (or highest) drop-down choice so as to include all companies..

Speaking of limits, you can get 200 results at a time. Ordinarily that's plenty, but if you are creating your own, large database you could find a criterion which allows you to bring up your prospects group by group.

And, thank goodness, you CAN export your results to a spreadsheet! So although Yahoo's program can't handle an equation such as "Rev.Est.Next Qtr." > "Rev.Est.This Qtr.", you can convert your results to a database, allowing further screening there.

Yahoo allows me to screen on enough of the criteria I like that I quickly pulled up a group of 31 microcaps. As with most screenings, a lot were eliminated because they were in an industry, such as finance, which I don't think will do well in the immediate future. Of the final dozen I looked at in depth, I chose the one which in some ways is riskiest because I can't get current information quickly and easily. Trinity Biotech plc is located in Ireland, though most of their stock trades on NASDAQ. Since Yahoo covers only the annual figures for smaller foreign companies I have to dig farther to keep up with quarterly developments and may miss timely news. A year ago this would have stopped me but today I will do whatever is necessary to try global investments.

Although Yahoo fails to post a lot of quarterly foreign data, I do hope the data in their screener is up to date! I can only hope that EPS(ttm) and EPS(mrq) are truly current. In addition, I haven't yet experimented with their program enough to know if a lot of good foreign companies are excluded because there is an "NA" in a critical field. This is a problem with a lot of screeners. I am still mourning the loss of my Reuters screen where I could specify "EPS(ttm)=>X OR EPS(ttm)=NA".

Footnote: Earlier, my Morningstar Screen led me to investigate a group of larger, established educational companies which do well in bear markets. I decided on Apollo Group (APOL) as the best bet to add to the Strategy Lab fund and bought it Friday.

Next: Onward to the free Microsoft Money screener.