Stock screeners can be a surprisingly invaluable tool for investors, whether you are doing it as a professional way of making money or something on the side. However, many people do not even know what they are, or how they are meant to be used as a whole.
If you are seriously considering investing in any shape or form, then a screener can sometimes be the right place to turn. But what are they, and do you actually need one?
What is a Stock Screener?
A stock screener is a tool that lets traders and investors quickly sort through a huge amount of stock options to find the ones that fit their needs, a bit like a search tool. They screen through a massive amount of stock opportunities, providing filters that can narrow down the results they display.
As you might expect, a stock screener can be a powerful tool for finding stocks you are happy investing in or avoiding ones that do not suit your needs. Compared to manually looking through hundreds of stocks, a screener is much more convenient and wastes far less time.
Are Stock Screeners Useful?
A stock screener is ideal for finding stocks you are interested in, specifically by helping you locate ones you know are right for you. These could be ones that fit your investment strategy, diversify your portfolio, or just look like safe low-risk options.
The main advantage of a screener is the fact that you can quickly parse through literally thousands of stocks without needing to manually compare each one. Being able to filter out so many irrelevant stocks makes it easy to locate ones that you actually want to invest in.
Beyond that, screeners can be useful for identifying stocks that are going to perform well over time. They are not just a search and filtering platform but also a way to track a stock’s potential future value and make a judgment call on which will earn you the best returns.
This makes them ideal for investors who want to make more long-term investment decisions, or just need a better understanding of a particular stock’s performance history. Given how accessible they are, they can be useful even for first-time investors or stock traders.
Should I Get a Stock Screener?
Stock screeners are incredibly useful for sorting through and analyzing thousands of stocks, and there is a huge range of both free and paid options to choose from. While choosing a screener tool can be difficult at first, all of them are going to serve the same basic purpose.
Overall, if you want to make more informed and calculated investment decisions, then a stock screener can definitely come in handy. By using one, you can easily eliminate stocks that you would not want to invest in and focus more on the ones that match your needs.
While they can take a while to get the hang of, the benefits of a good stock screener can make a massive difference to success when it comes to investing. The only downside is that you will need to adapt to using them, and make them a regular part of your investment strategy going forward.