How do you invest your money? Do you throw it at mutual funds and let someone else manage it? Do you throw it an index and just play the averages? Or do you try to out maneuver the market, and beat the averages by picking your own stocks? If you are in the latter category, the good news is that there are now free and simple tools available to everyone to help you filter out the losers, and narrow in on the winners. Yahoo, MSN and Google offer three of the most popular, well featured, and free stock screeners around. This article will help you get started.

1) The Yahoo Finance stock screener is a basic screener that allows you to search on 13 criteria, and also allows for limiting results based on either industry group or index membership.

2) MSN Money goes a step further and offers pre-defined Power Searches, as well as the manual stock screener where you enter each specific search criteria. If you believe in the power of momentum, then perhaps the MSN stocks at new 52 week high power search is for you. The power search automatically orders the results with the highest prices at the top. The disadvantage with the power search is that the resultant data is limited to only price and market capitalization info. If I could limit the power search results to only US based companies with high liquidity (> 500,000 shares/day), and stocks priced above 20, then the MSN power searches would be a regular stop for me.

3) The google stock screener has a very simple look and feel, but certainly not lacking in sophistication. I especially like the distribution graphic for the various parameters.

I also like google’s choice for the default search criteria using 4 simple parameters – market cap, p/e ratio, dividend yield and 52 week price change percentage. For my own screen, I used the following parameters:

  • Market Cap: 2B to 100B (not to small and not to large)
  • P/E Ratio: 10 to 40
  • Dividend Yield (%): 1 to 3 (why invest at all if they are not sharing the profits!)
  • 52 week price change (%): -5 to 50 (stay away from major losers, and bubbles in the making)

The above 4 criteria resulted in 111 companies. If I add a criteria for average volume over 500,000 shares, and stock price greater then 20, the results are then limited to 82 companies. To see the most recent results of the above search, use this google search link.

4) The Marketwatch stock screener also has a very simple look and feel, but goes a step further by allowing a user to enter both screening data and output data. The screening data entry is very easy to use and allows criteria based on price, volume, fundamentals, and technicals. It also allows results to specific exchanges or industries. Once all the search criteria are selected, you can then choose how to display the results, selecting which fields are displayed as well as which field to key the sort from.