A Tour of Stock Rover's Screeners

Overview

Selecting and running one or more screeners is generally the first step in any investment research process. Screeners will find a set of candidate investment ideas from a larger investment universe of stocks or ETFs. Screeners screen according to the investment criteria you care about. They can even rank passing tickers based on the investment factors that matter most to you.

There are fourteen screeners that are included out of the box with Stock Rover. These screeners cover a variety of investment strategies and approaches, as you will see when you read the individual descriptions below.

Note; if your account does not contain these exact screeners, it was likely established before we set this group as the current set of default screeners. If you are missing screeners you would like to have, you can import them via the Stock Rover Investor’s Library.

In addition to the fourteen screeners we provide by default, there are well over 100 additional screeners that are available to you and can be easily imported from the Investor’s Library. We will cover some of those screeners after the brief tour of the fourteen that ship with the product.

Note; there is also a companion video that demonstrates the screeners available in Stock Rover.

Below is a screenshot of the screeners you see when you first create an account and log into Stock Rover. This set of screeners is by no means fixed. They can be altered or removed, and you can create your own screeners or add them from the Stock Rover Investor’s Library.

Screener Tour

There are four general categories into which the fourteen screeners can be classified: Growth, Value, Momentum and Specific Strategies. Let’s dive in and take a look.

Growth Screeners

Dividend Growth

The Dividend Growth screener is composed of key Stock Rover dividend metrics. It looks for companies paying a reasonable yield of between 1.5% and 3.75% and are growing dividends at least 8% per year over the past 5 years. To ensure the company can afford the dividends it pays, it must also be growing earnings by at least 8% over the last 5 years and sales by 4%. Also, it cannot pay out more than 40% of its net income in dividends.

Growth at a Reasonable Price

The Growth at a Reasonable Price screener is composed of Stock Rover GARP (Growth At a Reasonable Price) metrics. Specifically both the 5 year EPS growth and operating income growth must be north of 15% per year. Ditto for next year’s estimated EPS. Also the 5 year sales growth must exceed 8% per year. The P/E must be under 20 and the trailing and forward PEG’s must be under 1.2.

Large Cap Growth with Momentum

The Large Cap Growth with Momentum screener finds large companies (greater than 5 billion in market cap) that are exhibiting strong revenue and earnings growth and are still reasonably priced. Also this screener ensures a company’s stock price is outperforming its industry and the S&P 500.

Long Term Growth

The Long Term Growth screener finds large companies (greater than 5 billion in market cap) that are exhibiting strong revenue and earnings growth and are still reasonably priced. Also this screener ensures a company’s stock price is outperforming its industry and the S&P 500.

Small Cap Growth

The Small Cap Growth screener looks for small companies (market cap less than 1 billion) that are both outperforming the S&P 500 and are within 15% of their 52 week high. The companies must be growing both their sales and earnings at a rapid clip. Finally, the companies must also have strong Return on Invested Capital performance.

Value Screeners

Fair Value

The Fair Value screener will find the 50 stocks that have the greatest margin of safety based on their Stock Rover computed fair value relative to their price.

Large Cap Value

The Large Cap Value screener finds large companies (greater than 5 billion in market cap) that are inexpensive by traditional measures such as low price to earnings, price to sales and price to book. These companies should still be growing sales and earnings.

Safe Performers

The Safe Performers screener finds stocks with high institutional ownership, low Beta and good value and quality grades and long term outperformance vs. the S&P 500.

Momentum Screeners

Relative Strength

The Relative Strength screener find stocks with strong relative strength defined as consistent outperformance vs. the S&P 500 in all periods, ranging from the short term (5 days) to the long term (5 years). The screener checks for outperformance in the intervening periods as well: 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year and 3 years. The longer the period, the more the outperformance must be to pass this screener.

Strong Buys

The Strong Buys screener finds stocks with a high margin of safety that are also in favor with the market as shown by a sentiment score in the top quartile and a recent buy sign from the MACD technical indicator.

Specific Strategy Screeners

Buffettology Inspired

The Buffettology Inspired screener is based on criteria described in the bestselling Buffettology book. The company should have a 10-year track record of generally increasing EPS with no negative earnings years; long-term debt not more than 5 times annual earnings; average ROE over the past ten years at least 15%; average ROIC over the last 10 years at least 12%; and earnings yield should be higher than the long term Treasury yield.

Capital Efficiency

The Capital Efficiency screener is composed of key Stock Rover capital efficiency metrics. Specifically, it screens for stocks with strong Returns on Invested Capital (ROIC), Returns on Assets (ROA) and Returns on Equity (ROE). It also ensures that the company’s ROA and ROE are well above its industry averages. Finally it screens on the famous Novy-Marx quality metric Gross Profits / Total Assets.

Piotroski High F-Score

The Piotroski High F-Score screener uses the 9 criteria that Joseph Piotroski, a professor of accounting at Stanford University developed to decide whether or not a stock has solid financials, and if the financials are getting better. Passing companies must have a perfect score of 9.

Top Stocks

The Top Stocks screener works with mid and large cap companies (greater than 2 billion in market cap). The screener finds stocks that pass criteria that one academic study indicated are most effective for future stock outperformance, as determined by back testing multiple strategies. The criteria that mattered are as follows: Enterprise value / EBITDA between 3 and 8; Return on Equity must exceed 18%; and Return on Assets must exceed 10%. Finally, the stock must exhibit current momentum by ensuring he current price is within 15% of its 52 week high.

100+ More Screeners in the Library

There are well over 100 additional screeners available in the Stock Rover Investor’s Library that are available to you and can be easily imported into your account. Importing is easy and is described in our help pages.

On the ETF side, we have a whole host of ETF screeners that screen for passing ETF candidates across a whole spectrum of criteria, ranging from big cap growth to small cap value. There are international screeners from to Asia to emerging markets. You can screen for sustainable ETFs, quality ETFs as well as dividend growth and yield. To see everything available, just put ETF into the library search box.

We have screeners in the library that implement the very popular Investor’s Business Daily CAN SLIM Investment system. We also have screeners that screen on Morningstar Grades.

We have a powerful Stock Rating System within Stock Rover, and there are a number of screeners in our library that will allow you to screen based on our ratings. The screeners cover the overall ratings as well as the components ratings such as valuation, efficiency, growth, dividends and momentum.

There are various small, mid and large cap growth and value screeners. There are dividend screeners for growth, yield and safety. There are also a number of momentum screeners. You can also find sector screeners in the library for many of the key sectors such as Tech, Healthcare and Industrials.

Other screeners of interest include Greenblatt’s Magic Formula screeners and O’Shaughnessy’s Cornerstone Growth based on James O’Shaughnessy’s What Works on Wall Street book.

There are many more screeners in the library, and they are easy to peruse, just like a regular library, except the Stock Rover library never closes. I encourage you to take a look and see all that Stock Rover offers for this first critical step of the investment process: finding promising investment candidates.