Screening Strategies

Find promising picks in the haystack with our highly flexible stock and ETF screeners.  Our screeners run in an instant, and since Stock Rover screens thousands of stocks on up-to-the-minute data, you always get the most relevant results.

Select from a Plethora of Pre-Built Screeners

Stock Rover comes with well over 140 pre-built screeners that cover all investment strategies. All of our pre-built screeners are easily accessible in one click from our Stock Rover Investor’s Library.

Create Your Own Custom Screeners

You can also easily create your own screeners in Stock Rover, either by modifying pre-built screeners or by building your own custom screeners from scratch. Creating screeners is easy to do in Stock Rover.

You can screen on any combination of over 500 price, operational, financial, efficiency and ratings metrics. This means you can screen using the investment strategies you prefer. You can decide if Growth, Value or Growth at a Reasonable Price (GARP) stocks are best. You can screen for Quality, Momentum, Dividend Growth or a myriad of other factors. You can use current and/or historical values in your screeners and you can write equations to screen for complex conditions.

Screen for ETFs

If you haven’t sunk your teeth into ETFs before, they can be a great low-cost way to diversify your portfolio. Just as with stocks and mutual funds, there are a wide variety of choices. Our screener can help you wade through thousands of ETFs to find the handful that are suitable for your investing needs and style. Read more about finding ETFs by Morningstar rating, expense ratio, technical indicators here.   Creating an ETF screener takes only a couple minutes but we also provide 16 out of the box screeners for criteria such as emerging markets or low expenses.

Rank for the Best

Our Premium screener lets you add weight to criteria in order to generate a ranking of stocks, so you start searching at the top. You can also apply your weights to watchlists or screeners to see how the stocks in those populations stack up. Ranking is simple to set up and the results are powerful.

Screen with Historical Data and Equations

Our Premium Plus screener allows you to write advanced custom equations and filter on historical data. For example, with freeform equations you can write a filter for stocks that have improved return on invested capital year over year. That’s just one example, but the possibilities are endless—this feature allows you to get highly specific and targeted.

Use Guru Strategies

Famous investors like Benjamin Graham, Peter Lynch  and Joel Greenblatt have done the hard part devising investment strategies.  Leverage their work with some of these screenable guru metrics.

Piotroski F-Score

The Piotroski score determines the financial strength of a company based on 9 criteria. Companies with a score of 8 or 9 are considered strong and a score between 0 and 2 indicates a weak company.  The performance of F-Score screeners (and any others) can be compared in the table or charted over a custom time period: 

Price to Graham Number

The price to Graham Number ratio is a conservative valuation measure based on Benjamin Graham’s classic formula. The Graham Number is one of his tests for whether a company is undervalued and is computed as the square root of 22.5 times the tangible book value per share times the diluted continuing earnings per share. Any stock with a value less than 1.0 is considered undervalued.

Price to Lynch Fair Value

The price to Peter Lynch Fair Value ratio is based on the famed investor’s valuation formula. It divides the price by the PEG rate times the 5-year EBITDA growth rate times continuing earnings per share. A stock with a value below 1.0 is considered undervalued.

Greenblatt Return on Capital

This variation of Return on Capital takes Operating Income (a.k.a. EBIT) as a percent of Net Property Plant and Equipment plus Current Assets. It is used by Joel Greenblatt in his bestselling book The Little Book That Beats the Market.

Greenblatt Earnings Yield

This variation of earnings yield compares Operating Income (a.k.a. EBIT) to Enterprise Value. It is used by Joel Greenblatt in his bestselling book The Little Book That Beats the Market.

Shiller PE

The Shiller P/E ratio or Cyclically Adjusted PE Ratio (CAPE Ratio) uses the 10-year inflation adjusted average earnings to compute a P/E ratio that spans the typical business cycle. Stock Rover will only compute this value if at least 7 years of historical data are available.

Beneish M-Score

A statistical model for determining if the company’s earnings have a high probability of accounting manipulation. An M-Score rating over -1.78 suggests possible earnings manipulation. Professor Beneish found that investing in low M-Score stocks and shorting high M-Score stocks would have outperformed the market by about 15% over the 7-year period he studied.

Altman Z-Score

This popular credit-strength measure aims to show how likely a company is to go bankrupt. Risky companies have a score below 1.8 and solid companies have a score of 3.0 or high. Financial institutions like banks are not scored.

Yacktman Forward Rate of Return

The Yacktman Forward Rate of Return can be thought of as the return that investors buying the stock today can expect from it in the future. It is similar to earnings yield but uses the normalized free cash flow of the past seven years and adds in the 5 year growth rate.

Sloan Ratio

The Sloan Ratio identifies companies with high accrual ratios, or high non-cash income or expenses. Sloan found that over a 40 year period buying low accrual companies and shorting high accrual one generated a return of more than twice the S&P 500. The ratio is computed by subtracting operating and investment cash flow from net income and dividing by total assets. If the result is between -10% and 10% the company is in the safe zone but if the result is greater than 25% or less than -25% earnings are likely to be made up of accruals. Accruals that continue across several quarters are a signal for doctored earnings.

Check Out the Stock Rover Screener Library

It’s easy to find and use screeners from the Stock Rover Investor’s Library. We provide a wide range of pre-built screeners that work for investors of all levels. Below are just a few examples. Sign up for a free account and try them out!

Cheapest Large Companies

This screen selects the 25 cheapest mid cap and large cap companies vs. their 5 year average considering the following metrics Price/Book, Price/Tangible Book, Price/Sales and Price/Earnings, each equally weighted.

Great Free Cash Flow

Find companies that are inexpensive as valued by Free Cash Flow that are also consistently growing sales, operating income and earnings over a 5 year period.

Magic Formula Like

Magic formula investing is a term referring to an investment technique outlined by Joel Greenblatt that uses the principles of value investing. This screen is similar to, but not exactly the same as Grenblatt’s sceen. Return on Invested Capital is used rather than Return on Capital. Also PE / Price is used rather than EBIT / EV for Earnings Yield.

Novy-Marx Quality

This screener creates the relatively simple but powerful Novy-Marx Quality screener. It looks for quality as measured by gross profits over total assets, momentum as measured by 1 year price change and value as measured by low price to book ratios. This screener also filters out stocks with very low market caps and trading volumes.

Momentum Screener

A screener composed of Stock Rover price momentum metrics.

Piotroski High F-Score Large Cap

Large cap companies scoring an 8 or a 9 on Piotroski’s F score, a financial health metric. See our blog for details about this metric.

CAN SLIM

Screens for baseline quantitative criteria in the CAN SLIM strategy.

Many More Screeners

With over 140 screeners in the Stock Rover library, it is a snap to browse for a wide variety of exciting investment ideas.