Views - See What You Want to See

Stock Rover offers over 700 financial metrics for researching and analyzing securities. Of course, depending on the research questions you’re asking, you are probably only focused on a handful of metrics that you care about at any given time. So how do you cut to the chase and get straight to the information that matters to you?  Easy – use Stock Rover Views.

Views are one of the key features that we believe sets Stock Rover apart from other investment research tools, yet they are not well understood by many users. If you haven’t yet created or modified a View, read on. In just a few minutes, you’ll know everything you need to know about this eminently useful feature.

What are Views?

View are the named tabs on top of the Stock Rover Table, as shown in the screenshot below.

Each View contains a list of metrics. Selecting a specific view will display the metrics contained in the view as columns in the table.

The Stock Rover Table is designed to provide a flexible spreadsheet for viewing tickers and their data. The Table allows investors to compare any data set such as indices, watchlists, screeners, and portfolios across many dimensions of financial, operational, and price performance.

The Table is comprised of multiple Views. In spreadsheet nomenclature think of the Table as the workbook, the Views as worksheets and the View’s metrics as columns. The rows are the tickers of the particular dataset you are looking at. By dataset, I mean a specific portfolio, watchlist, screener, index or a list of quotes.

Although similar in concept to worksheets in Excel, Views are easier to use, because the columns are all pre-built and “ready to go” and you never have to worry about updating them, as the data displayed in each View is always current.

As each View is a container for a set of columns, clicking on a different View tab will reveal a different set of columns in the table. In the above screenshot, for example, the Current Returns tab is selected. This view shows price changes and other information related to a stock’s current returns. You might want to switch to this View when you are checking up on or analyzing a portfolio. The idea here is that you can keep together the columns that you like to look at together.

Stock Rover comes out of the box with a comprehensive set of Views, including Portfolio Performance, Growth, Momentum, Valuation, Returns vs. the S&P 500 and many more. Additional Views are available for import from the Investor Library. You can use any View as is or as a jumping-off point from which you can customize the View to include your own preferred collection of columns.

You can modify a View in three ways: adding columns, deleting columns, and changing the order of columns. Note that if you make changes to a standard View and want to revert to the original, no worries, simply import it from the Investor Library.

Sorting a View

Let’s take an existing View and sort it. The Momentum View contains technical indicators that I like to look at after running certain screeners. Usually, the first thing I want to know is which stocks from my screener are closest to their 52-week high. Since a column with this information—the 52-week Range column—is already in this View, all I need to do is sort it by clicking its column header. in this case, I want the sort order to be descending, so I click the column header twice.

Now every time I click on the Momentum tab, whatever stocks I am looking at in the Table will instantly get sorted by where they are in their 52-week range. Whatever is closest to its 52-week high will appear at the top.

Adding and Removing Columns

When I’m looking at momentum indicators, I also like to know when the 52-week high was reached. So, I’m going to add the column 52-week High Date. I do so by using the ‘Add Column’ search box, shown below.

When I select 52-wk High Date from the list, it appears as the left-most numerical column (next to Rank). But to keep things tidy, I prefer to put it with similar metrics, so I drag and drop the column to cluster it with its cousins, 52-week Range and Price vs. 52-week High.

There is just one more thing I want to do to perfect my Momentum view. Since I rarely look at the Price vs. 200-day Average metric, I’m going to delete it by right-clicking on that column header and selecting ‘Remove Column,’ as shown below.

Note: As a general rule of thumb – when in doubt right-click!

And presto! As we see below my Momentum View is complete: it shows exactly the momentum information I want to see—nothing more, nothing less—and in the order I want to see it.

As you can see in the screenshot below, since my sort is based on 52-week Range – CRA International is the top row, as it just hit a 52-week high.

Using the View Manager

In the above example, I only made a few changes to my View, so it was easiest to use the Add Column search box, drag-and-drop, and the right-click menu.

However, if I want to significantly change the design of my View, I would probably find it easier to go to the View Manager window, which I can get to simply by right-clicking on a View Tab. Here we are presented with a number of options. We’ll select “Update” because we are interested in altering the View.

What appears next is the window below:

I can add or remove columns to my View as I see fit. I can find columns to add either by browsing through the folders on the left or by Searching for Column Name. Everything added to the View will collect in the list to the right.

I can alter the order of the columns in the table by dragging and dropping the column names within the list on the right side.

Creating a New View from Scratch

To start with a totally clean slate, I can right click on any View Tab and Select “Create”.

This brings up the View Manager again. For this new View, which I’ll call “Sampler”, I’m going to add a medley of different kinds of metrics I like to look at when just getting started with fundamental research on a company. I pull a few key columns from each of the Valuation, Profitability, Growth, and Balance Sheet categories.

As mentioned before, I can re-order these columns by dragging and dropping them inside the right pane. Whatever is at the top of the list will appear as the left-most column in the Table.

When I click ‘Save,’ Sampler gets added as the right-most tab in my Views bar. If I want to move it into a different position, I can either drag and drop the View tab or right-click it and select ‘Reorder Views’.

Also notice the Views pulldown allows you to quickly toggle between View tabs. Here the Views are sorted alphabetically to make it fast to find the View you are interested in.

Onward and Upward

By now I hope you feel you have a new friend in Views, and are excited to start customizing your own.

For more on Views and Tables please see our Views Help and Table Overview, or get in touch with us at support@stockrover.com.