Best Free Stock Screeners

Free stock screeners, when they satisfy the requirements of your investing strategies, can be one of the best deals around.

Not only are they free, but they often come with several pre-defined stock screens, free portfolio management tools and represent sites with extensive investment information related to stocks and the financial markets.

To paraphrase Kermit the Frog, "It's not easy being free". There will be lots of ads and links to fee-based enhancements because the cost of maintaining free stock screening tools is significant. So, don't whine about the ads and links.

Without exception, these are online stock screeners.

And, generally, require some type of registration with the option to be put on a mailing list. The registration form for the Zacks screener is shown below:

Identify the Best, Eliminate the Useless

Keep in mind the goal of stock screening is to reduce the time required to locate and analyze suitable investment or trading opportunities. If using a free stock screener creates more work for you than it saves, it is not a good deal even if it is free.

The primary consideration, always, is whether or not the screener is adequate for you. 

1. Are there pre-defined screens?
2. Can you build the screens you need?
3. Can you save the screens you build?

On occasion, I see a list of "Best Free Stock Screeners" with some products that could best be described as useless. Do some follow-up evaluation for yourself before committing to any particular product.

1 - Pre-built screens

You may or may not be able to use pre-built screens directly, but at least you can see how the site owners have used the available criteria. These can also be a great starting point for your own screens.

2,3 - Building and saving your screens

If the pre-built screens are not enough, you must be able to create or modify screening criteria. So there must be adequate data.

And unless you want to re-enter your custom screen each time you use the screener, you must be able to save the screen. If the screen cannot be saved, it is unlikely to be one of the best free stock screeners.

Free Stock Screeners

The availability of free online screeners changes as a business decision of the company hosting the site. To save you time trying to locate a screener that no longer exists, out-of-service screeners are included in the list with a no longer available (NLA) notation. Where additional information about out-of-service screeners is available, a link is provided in the Screener Museum list.

Currently, the list of free stock screening sites includes only screeners offering some fundamental data for screening. Free stock screeners that offer only technical analysis are not currently listed.

Screeners have been catagorized as:

• Best choices
• Limited but might work
• Not much value
• Screener Museum

If you know of other free screeners please contact us so we can share the information with everyone.

Free stock screeners - best choices

Please keep in mind the following list represents our opinion of the best free stock screeners. You need to make your own evaluation. We developed a screener evaluation approach which you may find useful in your search for tools.

StockScreening101 recomendations (in aphabetical order) and links to our detailed review:

• CNBC - Online screener with reasonable data capabilities.
• FinViz - A free screener with excellent visualization capabilities. Requires free registration.
• NASDAQ Stock Screener - The Zacks screener implemented on nasdaq.com.
• Stock Rover - A free screener with excellent visualization, portfolio and notification capabilities. Requires free registration.
• Zacks - Free screener available on Zacks or NASDAQ (as shown above). Requires registration. Note that the Zacks proprietary data is not available with the free version, only the premium version.

Screeners with limited features

The following screeners have limits, but may be adequate:

• NASDAQ Guru Screener - A special breed of screener that implements published investing strategies.
• Morningstar - The free screener from Morningstar has limited company financial data. Most criteria are limited to Morningstar proprietary grading. You can save the results to a portfolio but cannot save the screen. Registration is required.
• Yahoo Stock Screeners - Two free screeners were offered at one time. Only the basic Yahoo stock screener is currently available. Limited capabilities but supported by extensive financial data.

Screeners with little value

Don't waste your time.

• AOL - Once upon a time there was a screener with some fundamental and growth criteria. Now it is 2 pre-built lists; 1) Biggest Gainers, 2) Biggest Losers. You can save results to AOL Portfolio. 
• MarketWatch - Very little fundamental data. Save results to MarketWatch portfolio.
• MSN - Replacement for MSN Deluxe has little data available and custom screens cannot be saved. One redeeming virtue is the number of markets which can be screened.

Screener Museum

These screeners are no longer available. If you are interested, more details are available in the Museum.

• Google Finance (NLA) - The screener had an interesting presentation style and a good selection of fundamental data. Screens could not be saved for future use so it did not have much value.
• Hoovers (NLA)
• MSN Deluxe (NLA) - We considered MSN Deluxe the best available free stock screener. The review has been saved in the Museum.
• Portfolio123 - The free version of this online screener has been discontinued. See review of fee-based version.
• Quicken (NLA)
• Reuters (NLA)
• Yahoo java stock screener (NLA) - An excellent stock screening tool.

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