Automatic Stock Screening
Stock screening is the process of searching for stocks that meet certain predetermined investment and financial criteria. A stock screener has three components: a database of companies, a set of variables and a screening engine that finds the companies satisfying those variables to generate a list of matches. Automatic screens query a stock database to select and rank stocks according to user-specified (or pre-specified) criteria. Technical screens search for stocks based on patterns in price or volume. Fundamental screens focus on sales, profits, and other business factors of the underlying companies. By focusing on the measurable factors affecting a stock's price, stock screeners help users perform quantitative analysis. Screening focuses on tangible variables such as market capitalization, revenue, volatility and profit margins, as well as performance ratios such as the PE ratio or debt-to-equity ratio. For example, an investor may want to do a search using a screen for all those companies that have a price/earnings ratio of less than 10, an earnings growth rate of more than 15%, and a dividend yield of more than 4%.
Read more about this topic: Stock Selection Criterion
Famous quotes containing the words automatic and/or stock:
“The ruin of the human heart is self-interest, which the American merchant calls self-service. We have become a self- service populace, and all our specious comforts—the automatic elevator, the escalator, the cafeteria—are depriving us of volition and moral and physical energy.”
—Edward Dahlberg (1900–1977)
“All that stock of arguments [the skeptics] produce to depreciate our faculties, and make mankind appear ignorant and low, are drawn principally from this head, to wit, that we are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things.”
—George Berkeley (1685–1753)