There are thousands of stocks listed on stock exchanges. Selecting the right stocks is the first step for successful investing. But that is very hard and tricky! Everyone may need to use stock screeners.
Trading with your hard-earned money can be stressful. You want to make a profit by trading a lucky stock. However, you cannot always be on the lucky boat. You need to do the pre-screening to find the right stocks matching your investment style, risk appetite, and trading frequency. Pre-screening is a key to overcome your fear and trade with confidence.
This article introduces several platforms with very favorable stock screeners and describes the processes for setting up your screeners and chart patterns.
Disclaimer:The trade strategies and news coverage in this article are based on our opinions alone and are only for illustration purposes. We are not financial advisors. The information in this article should not be taken as financial advice or as guidance for buying or selling securities. We are only sharing our opinions based on personal experiences. An individual trader's results may not be typical and may vary from person to person. It is important to keep in mind that there are always risks associated with investing in the stock market and potentials for heavy losses. Thus, your trading should be based on your research and due diligence.
List of Stock Screening Platforms (No Particular Order)
1. Finviz
2. FlowAlgo
4. OpenInsider
5. FutuBull
1. Finviz
Finviz is one of the best stock screening platforms providing free access to the stock screener and company financial summary information. There are numerous traders using Finviz frequently to quickly stock screen stocks and ETFs and check the market sector movement.
We recommend using the Market Sector Movement Session to check for the strongest sector and the Tickers Session to check for the specific familiar chart patterns. Below are a few common chart patterns to check at the beginning of the day:
Triangle Descending
Double Bottom
Double Top
Trendline Support
Wedge Down
Finviz is mostly free and doesn't require sign-up. It already contains a broad range of screening filters as shown on the screen below.
Now is the fun part. Below is an example of the filter setup for finding potential stocks. We will show the detailed steps to set up the screener and select stocks from the screening list.
1. Go to Finviz and navigate to the 'Screener' Tab as shown in the above image
2. Navigate to the 'All' tab and then select the following from Screener Options
Insider Ownership: Low (<5%)
20-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA20
50-Day Simple Moving Average: Price crossed SMA50
Analyst Recom.: Buy or better
RSI: Not Oversold (>40)
Pattern: Wedge Down
Current Volume: Over 1M
The following stocks were filtered out on Jan 17, 2021.
The blue line showed the price support level while the purple one the resistance level. Our goal was to identify two scenarios below:
Stocks with the price hitting the purple line and about to break out!
Stocks with the price hitting the blue line and about to bounce up!
Below is another set of screener settings:
Insider Ownership: Low (<5%)
20-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA20
50-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA50
200-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA200
Institutional Transaction: Positive (>0%)
Analyst Recom.: Buy or better
RSI: Not Oversold (>40)
Pattern: TL Support
Current Volume: Over 1M
Average Volume: Over 1M
Price: Under $40
The following stocks were filtered out on Jan 17, 2021. Our goal was to identify two scenarios below:
Stocks with the price already above the purple line, When this event occurs, the purple line automatically becomes the support level for the stock. It is good to enter a trade when the stock price pulls back to the purple line.
Stocks with the price hitting the blue line and about to bounce up!
Note: You can use the screener to identify the stocks with better chances of profitability. However, we would also monitor the indexes to confirm if they are not breaking their trend line. If we see a signal for a market downturn or a big sell-off to occur due to a correction or black swan event, then the trend line for individual stocks will not hold.
Pricing:
The Finviz free version already covers a majority of the functionalities you may need. I would recommend you start with the free version to get familiar with the tool.
If you want to unlock more advanced functionality, such as real-time and extended hours stock data, correlations between stocks, and backtesting, then you can upgrade your plan to the Elite version. Below are the differences between the Free and Elite versions for your reference. TFinviz Elite is priced at $24.96 / month under a yearly plan and $39.50 / month for the monthly plan. A full refund is guaranteed within the first 30 days of the subscription.
2. FlowAlgo
If you want to trade options and obtain additional information for the option pool, especially the dark pool, you should use Flowalgo, the best platform for finding potential trading opportunities.
Side Note on the dark pool: Dark pools are private exchanges for trading securities that are not accessible by public investors. Dark pools are primarily for facilitating trades with a significantly large number of securities by institutional investors who do not want to impact the markets with their large orders and receive adverse prices.
Flowalgo can detect the dark pool trades and automatically alert investors on orders with an unusual amount of shares. FlowAlgo is the new online service that gives retail traders access to stocks and options the Big Money Traders are trading.
Below are the key features and advantages of the FlowAlgo platform:
Real-Time Option Flow
Dark Pool Prints and Insights
Unusual Volume Alert
AI-based Alpha to provide live recommendations on Options
Voice Alerts
Trader Chatroom
FlowAlgo only tracks what's truly valuable so that you no longer have to dig for data or maintain complex spreadsheets. Unusual Movement and Order Entries are voice alerted to you in realtime so that you can simply follow the big money.
FlowAlgo mainly tracks the following 3 types of orders:
Sweepers: Orders entered with urgency while staying under the radar by splitting large orders across multiple exchanges using smart routing technology, concealing their true size, and executing in microseconds.
Blockers: Privately negotiated option block trades. Substantial in size.
Equity Blocks and Darkpool Prints: Large equity block trades across public and private exchanges
Pricing:
For users who need a second opinion before entering into a trade or like to follow the big money movement, we strongly recommend FlowAlgo for your trading support. However, the drawback is its expensive pricing. We would strongly suggest you split the fee with friends. 😊 Below are the pricing details for your reference.
3. Simply Wall St
Simply Wall St is an amazing platform that provides unique in-depth visual reports for over 100k stocks worldwide. It evaluates companies with five dimensions: dividend, value, future, health, and past performance in a clear chart for investors to review. Below is a glance at the visual reports from the platform.
Once you logged in to the website, you will see the following landing page with all the market details and news related to your selected stocks.
The two key features of Simply Wall St are the Discover and Screener as shown below:
Discover: This tab contains two sections.
One is Investing Ideas, which categorizes stocks into different categories such as Buy the Dip, Potentially Undervalued, and Dividend Rock Starts. It is very helpful for traders to select stocks that fit their appetite.
Investing Ideas:
The other section is sample portfolios, which show several portfolios from many big names such as Bill Ackman, Charlie Munger, and ARK Investment Management for investors to review and follow.
Sample Portfolios:
If you open the ARK Investment Management, you will find all their holdings and the risk-reward evaluation of each stock. An interesting observation is all of the stock charts below show great financial health status and better future growth. So, you can also set up your screener to focus on stocks with good financial health and higher future growth potential.
Screener: This tab provides stock screening by Stock Markets (worldwide), Industry, and Advanced Filter on an extensive list of secondary features.
Taking the above risk-reward chart as an example, let's create a screener solely focus on health and future dimensions! The short video below shows you how to create a screener. You can filter by Market, Industry, and other advanced filters and adjust your chart dimensions. In this case, we only select the United States for the Market and "hide secondary listings" of the Advanced Filter and adjust the dimensions.
As you can see, the screener selected eight potential stocks. From the past market data, you already know that PTON has grown exponentially during the pandemic. And, so is YALA! By clicking on the stock, you can navigate to its in-depth visual report to further review the company's status!
Pricing:
Simply Wall St comes with a free version, which doesn't contain the screener and stock idea view. There are three plans for the platform. We strongly recommend the Investor Plan, with which you can utilize the tool without paying the high price for the Professional Plan. Below are the plan details for your reference. You will have a 14-day money-back guarantee if you don't like the platform after the purchase.
4. OpenInsider
If you don't know what to buy, it is good to follow some big guys' trading activities. OpenInsider provides you a perfect opportunity to follow C-suite level personnel and Senior Directors' trading activities.
To comply with the requirement for insider trading by C-suite personnel, senior executives need to submit an SEC Form to make a trade in the stock market. The OpenInsider platform provides you the search power to identify which executives submitted an SEC Form to buy/sell shares. Usually, the number of shares is fairly large. So it is good to follow their trades to ensure you are in the right direction.
Below is our setup of the filters to select potential growth stocks:
General Section:
Share Price Max: 50
Date Section:
Filing Date: Last 1 week
Trade Date: Last 1 week
Transaction Filing
Check P - Purchase Box
Check S - Sale Box
As you can see, most of the transactions are by CEO, CFO, SVP, and VP level executives. You can then click on the Filing Date link to view the SEC form details and copy the ticker to the platforms mentioned in this blog to get further details of the stock status!
Note: sometimes, you may not find the same ticker name listed on the other platforms. For example, you can see SVFA is listed as the ticker for SVF Investment Corp. on the first row of the above image and has been purchased by its CEO for 2,377,000 shares. But you can't find it in other screening platforms such as FINVIZ or Simple Wall St. In this case, you may look for this ticker in your trading platforms such as WeBull or FutuBull. You will find the ticker was SVFAU for the same company. Below is the screenshot from WeBull for the SVFAU ticker.
Since the CEO purchased the stock at $10, this stock price has already jumped to $13.28, a 30% return. However, It could still be a good chance to buy this stock as it seems it just went to the public on the market and already had a pullback from its previous high. Also, executives usually will hold the stocks for the long term and expect a profit of at least 50% before selling. So, our guess is the stock can still grow in the long run.
5. FutuBull
If you checked my previous blog regarding the top trading platforms to use in Canada and China, you would find I'm a big fan of FutuBull. Once you log in FutuBull Platform and navigate to the Opportunity section in the Strategy Selection tab, you will find multiple built-in strategies as shown below:
By selecting the Screener tab, you can navigate to the screener dashboard and set up your filters. Let's take an example to set up the EMA and RSI indicator as described in the Stock Chart Indicator blog.
Screener Setups:
Confirm the upper trend line: EMA 7 > EMA 15 > EMA 30 > EMA 50
Confirm the healthy RSI: 50 < RSI < 80
Set Volume to be greater than 1000K to ensure enough liquidity of the stock
MACD to be Golden Cross
Note: All Setup is at 1D level
Below is the demo video for the setup in FutuBull. Once you set up your screening, you can save the settings as your strategy and repeatedly review it later. There is no limit on the number of strategies you can set up in FutuBull!
Make sure you do the screening before the market starts. Once you identified the potential stocks to trade, you can enter them by following the VWAP indicator discussed in this linked blog!!
Summary
Above are the top 5 Stock screening platforms we have identified for you. There are many other platforms out there as well but we cannot cover them here to keep the blog not too long.
However, we list a few good ones below with the links for you to check out. We may introduce them in future blogs.
Fintel.io: Financial Research Website
Market Chameleon: A great platform to identify big movers in pre/post-market
bamSEC: Financial Research Website by searching SEC filings and earnings transcripts
koyfin: BI Dashboard for global stock market data
eFD: United States Senate Financial Disclosures
EarningsWhispers: Sentiment Analysis of companies' earnings result
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