Finviz blog

Keep things simple

Technical screens won’t provide too much help for our long-term strategy of investing into value stocks. You might find more valuable to set them up when looking into day-trading.

The most common metrics investors screen for

Market Capitalization

Specifying the minimum market cap is useful for filtering out the small companies that are too unpredictable and staying away from giant firms that are too large to keep up a rapid pace.

Price

It is good to eliminate any stocks that trade under $10 as they tend to be too volatile.

Volume

Volume is less significant than in case of higher frequency traders, but you still want to avoid a stock that barely trades. Look for stocks that trade with adequate trading volume to ensure that you can buy and sell easily. Your volume filter should exclude stocks that trade fewer than 300,000 shares per day.

Past performance

Set your screening criteria to show you stocks that rose 5% or more during the previous month. This will eliminate stocks that are losing value. You can also set performance criteria for different time periods but always account for the current market and industry you wish to target.

P/E Ratio

Price-to-earnings ratio is one of the most important ratios. It looks at the price of the shares to earnings. However, it is crucial to compare PE ratios between companies in the same industry since different industries have different appetites for risk and their PE ratios can differ significantly. Generally, the lower the PE ratio for an industry, the better. Ideally, investors are looking for single-digit PE ratios.

PEG Ratio

Many investors prefer the price to earnings to growth ratio as it accounts for growth and is a better indicator of the future. However, be cautious when discounting an investment based on PEG as the future earnings growth rate cannot be predicted exactly. Similarly to PE ratios, the lower the PEG ratio is, the better.

Bonus preset

Return on equity

A high return on equity signals the presence of a competitive advantage in a company. A competitive advantage helps a company to withstand competition and bring higher profits over the long-term. Look for return on equity higher than 15%.

Futures are financial contracts that obligate the buyer to purchase an asset or the seller to sell an asset at a predetermined future date and price. Such asset is usually a physical commodity or a financial instrument. Stock index futures offer an alternative way to trade the stock markets. In addition, high level of leverage and around-the-clock trading of futures are some the features unique to them.

Futures are not intended for the main street investors trading, but you still want to pay attention. Tracking futures and their performance gives insights into the direction of the equities market and key stock market indices to infer implications.

Futures information at Finviz

Most of the major financial sites include information on futures such as Bloomberg, CNBC, and Reuters. We’ll use Finviz as an example. On the main page, you can find the current market status, the biggest movers, and recent events. You can navigate to the Finviz futures page from the top navigation bar which includes screener, maps, portfolios, insider trading, and others. Alternatively, on the main Finviz page, scroll down and find a section on futures. When you click any of their changes, it will take you to their charts.

What to pay attention to

At the Finviz futures page, the first dominant section shows you a heat map for equity, commodities and currencies futures. It’s a great overview of the current state of the futures market. Additionally, the heat map provides an easy visual correlation between the various futures contracts.

Next to the heat map, you can find a relative performance chart for the current day and individual Finviz futures charts performance. This is an incredibly valuable feature since you can compare all the futures next to each other for different time periods. The furthest in the past you can explore is up to 5 years. The shortest are 5-minute intervals in the past hours. When you click on any of the charts and get even more information about it. This includes detailed performance, volumes, and commitment of traders (COT) positions.

Besides the charts for main indices such as Dow Jones, S&P500, and Nasdaq100 you can find quotes for crude oil, natural gas, oil, metals or VIX in Finviz futures list. Use the sector performance tools to filter futures belonging to a specific category. Furthermore, you can explore correlations as part of the paid Finviz Elite.

Example of gold technical analysis using the charts at Finviz:

Disadvantages

The data and information available are definitely great but there is information that you might find missing from Finviz. An example is mutual funds or some foreign stock indices cannot be found in the Finviz screener at all.

Conclusion

Finviz is a must have for any trader since their information of futures quotes, stocks, and free screener are one of the best.

Stock screeners are an essential tool for all investors looking for new investments. While many websites offer free stock screeners the quality can vary greatly. As a result, the best stock screeners provide versatility, depth, and functionality to give you the best finds.

Finviz

Finviz is one of the most comprehensive sites for financial information and its screener is the free best stock scanner for US stocks available. We’ve covered the stock screener in our first post.

Morningstar

Morningstar is a leader in independent investment research. While it offers a free screener covered below, the premium membership is full of tools and great information you won’t get anywhere else. The premium screener allows you to refine your custom screens with over 300 fundamental data filters. Additionally, it offers several predefined screens built by their top analysts. You can also save your custom screens. Another great feature allows to save and track any passing stocks through the portfolio manager.

Zacks

The search categories in the custom screener are very wide-range but also reflect the idea that beating or missing earnings forecasts influences stock prices more than cash flow or book value. Free site registration brings access to a blank template or already preset screens. You can customize them by just about every metric and ratio that can be derived from a financial statement and some uniquely from Zacks.

TradingView

The TradingView screener is very user friendly. It offers tens of predefined screens that can help a beginner. Additionally, it splits the screener results into columns such as performance, valuation, oscillators, and others. Another big advantage is the ability to choose different markets and international exchanges. Automatic refreshes and alerts are part of the upgraded tiers. In addition, it also offers Forex signal finder. While it caters to a slightly different group of use cases than Finviz, it is one of the best stock screeners currently available.

Google Finance

Google Finance‘s stock screener is one of the best free stock screeners on the web. In terms of breadth, Google Finance is the best due to the fact that you can screen across many markets and fundamental metrics. The Google Finance screener updates in real time and uses sliders to adjust ranges. Because of this, it can show the distribution of companies across the particular metric. Unfortunately, you cannot export data into a spreadsheet. Only one other free screener enables you to screen countries besides the U.S., so this is still a useful tool for your investing toolkit. Unfortunately, it has been discontinued in March 2018.

Yahoo! Finance

You can search stocks by industry, index membership, share data such as price, market cap, beta, sales and profitability, valuation ratios, analyst estimates and create scans with hundreds of different screening criteria. The finance homepage has detailed information about the stock market. It includes market news and live streams of current market conditions on the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P’s 500 index.

There are many more screeners and cheap market research software available. Let us know in the comments what you think about the best stock screeners.

Finviz offers a paid version, Finviz Elite, to its users. It’s a great source of information to identify trading and investing opportunities. Finviz provides visitors access to market information, which is presented in a highly visual and easy-to-use format. While most tools are available for free to all users, registration is required in order to save any settings. The Elite mode provides all the tools with real-time data and opens up other features. They most of all include premarket data, advanced charting, backtesting, correlations, alerts and a no-advertising layout.

Finviz Elite summary

The cost of Finviz Elite is less than $40 per month or around $300 per year (both are subject to change). The Elite version provides access to all standard features plus additional features such as real-time quotes, premarket data, advanced charting, backtesting, correlations, alerts and an absence of advertisements. The Finviz real-time data and an interface without ads are the most common incentives for purchasing Finviz Elite subscriptions.

Real-time quotes

With an upgrade to Finviz Elite, all of the features are in real-time. These include charts, screeners and market maps. Pre-market data is also available, which allows traders to analyze and screen for stocks that are moving in the pre-market. Tools such as the market map provide a snapshot of what all of the stocks and ETFs in the S&P 500, U.S. or worldwide are doing in the pre-market hours.

Advanced charting

The Finviz advanced charts will draw in some support and resistance levels and chart patterns for deeper analysis. They can also offer advanced technical analysis tools.

Backtester

Finviz backtester lacks the power and functionality of some of the advanced programs. However, it is extremely useful for quickly evaluating trade ideas. Using the backtester you can test around a hundred of technical indicators on survivorship bias free stock data going back 20 years. You can’t test fundamental rules but you can combine indicators, add in transaction costs, stop losses, time-based exits and then compare your results to the benchmark. Running the test takes about a minute. Finviz shows you the backtester results in a number of different formats. It also compares the performance to the buy and hold benchmark SPY return and the equal-weighted SPY.

Alerts

Set alerts for rating changes, news, insider transactions or if the price moves above or below a specific price. Multiple symbols can be monitored in this fashion, and you set which alerts you wish to receive. Everytime your defined change happens, you’ll receive an email.

Correlations

Correlations have many benefits to traders, including the ability to find stocks that act like other stocks or move very differently. When Elite members view a stock chart, a list of correlated and inversely correlated stocks is provided below it.

Beyond the extensive screening capabilities, informative heat maps, forex and futures support, and customization of layout, charts, and screens, Finviz lists transactions made by insiders, a social community feed, and the latest news for each stock. In this Finviz review, we’ll focus on the stock screening power.

When you compare the functionality provided to the price charged, the value is compelling. If it weren’t for the intimidating interface that new users experience in getting familiar with the software, Finviz would be perfect.

For a longer elaboration of Finviz value, review the pros and cons below.

Finviz review – PROs

• it’s almost free. You probably won’t need the paid version, especially if you’re starting out since the free Finviz features are great.
• powerful screener. For technical analysis, input almost any piece of criteria and receive all stocks that pass the filters. Market cap, average volume, sector, price, exchange, float short, return on equity, shares outstanding, average true range, beta, etc. The list of Finviz screener settings goes on and on.
• informative heat maps. A great way of allowing for quick consumption of large amounts of market data and the market maps can be customized quickly.
• information spread. Finviz offers condensed and understandable information on stocks, ETFs, futures, markets, sectors, industries or countries. It includes fundamental and technical data, heat maps and insider trading feeds as well as relevant news.
• saving of frequent screens or watchlists. Therefore, each registered or premium member can easily save screens and watchlists. It is possible to create alerts for fresh news, price moves, rating changes, and insider trades.

Finviz review – CONs

• ads. The free accounts come with a few common problems and besides regular image ads it also includes video ads. Most of all, the free version of Finviz displays video ads which can be a little annoying.
• overwhelming for beginners. The first experience with Finviz is intimidating because so much data is presented. It makes it difficult to know where to begin.
• user experience. If you know what you’re looking for you can find it easily but if you are going through your first screens, the Finviz user experience won’t provide much instruction to figure out where to start.
• inability to stack filters together. While you can customize the ranges for a majority of the criteria, you can’t select more than a single range per filter.
• no OTCs support. Finviz doesn’t support viewing or tracking data about OTC stocks. The same applies to international stocks, which the Finviz screener doesn’t support.
• no Finviz mobile app available. Furthermore, the site is somewhat difficult to access and browse on smaller-sized screens. The Finviz mobile experience is not functioning very well.

If you’d like to see what the paid version of Finviz is capable of, check our post on Finviz Elite.

To help you understand how you can find new stocks with the screener at Finviz, watch this video on finding quality growth stocks.

By a rule of thumb, if you try to be many things, you’ll end up being mediocre at all of them. That is not the case with Finviz features. Its screener, heat maps, and insider trading information are still the best ones among non-institutional services.

Screener

You can narrow the search for the right stocks by inputting descriptive criteria. The criteria include significant filters such as an exchange, market capitalization, price, average volume or ratios. Choose from fundamental criteria including P/E ratio, debt/equity ratio, net profit margin, and EPS growth. Select technical criteria to further narrow the search using filters such as performance, chart patterns, candlesticks or RSI levels. Altogether there are close to 100 criteria, which can be customized to different values. Thus resulting in thousands of ways to fine-tune a stock screen.

Finviz example screener settings

Watch how to find the best stocks before they break out.

Heat maps

The heat map market symbols are clear and sized according to the market-cap and sectors. Furthermore, you can choose to view a World Map, ETF Map, and sort the map by a variety of factors. The factors are surprisingly both technical and fundamental. Therefore you have all the powers to gain quick and accurate ideas of where to start analyzing the stocks that stand out.

Insider trading

The Finviz insider trading feature shows recent insider transactions with their value, type, number of shares and person making the transaction. You can sort and filter the information in a number of ways.  Use single and double clicks to zoom in or view a particular cell, stock, or ETF.

Futures

The Finviz futures tab allows traders to get a quick informative snapshot of what is happening in the Futures market. It also includes which contracts are up or down and by how much. Moreover, everything is color coded for easy understanding. A relative performance chart is included so you can make out which contracts are outperforming or underperforming.  You can view the data in both quote form as well as in chart form. Chart form shows the individual charts of the Finviz futures in small windows side by side for easy comparison.

Forex

Very similar to the Finviz futures tab is the Finviz forex tab that provides a quick snapshot of what the major currencies are doing. A relative performance chart shows the visualization of which currency pairs are outperforming or underperforming. You can again view the data in a chart form or a quote form.

Groups

The Finviz groups provide overview of how a particular breakdown of sectors, industries or countries has been performing over a number of time frames. Additionally, you can sort stocks by performance in terms of industry, country or capitalization. How you view the data can also be altered from bar chart form to overview, valuation, performance, spectrum, grid or charts.

The first blog introduces Finviz, which stands for Financial Visualizations. It is a one-stop shop for equity, future, and forex traders who want to find new trading opportunities and backtest strategies. The intuitive Finviz heat maps show which stocks are growing and declining each day. Plus, a wealth of financial information lies under the hood from insider trading to earnings releases.

Finviz provides visitors access to US stock market information, which is presented in a highly visual and easy-to-use format. While most tools are available for free to all users, you’ll need to register in order to save any settings. Registration is free for all users. Additionally, users can also upgrade to Finviz Elite for a monthly or yearly fee. The Elite plan provides additional tools on top of real-time data. Furthermore, it offers other features such as premarket data, advanced charting, backtesting, correlations, alerts and a layout without advertising.

Finviz offers a different set of tools compared to other software for finding very specific fundamental indicators and technical setups. It also allows viewing multiple charts the same time. Once you identify several stocks that fit your parameters you can access more in-depth look at the technicals elsewhere.

Homepage

On the main page or homepage, you can find a broad range of information on the whole market in a largely condensed format. Visitors can quickly see what the market is doing at all times. Secondly, you can clearly see which stocks are moving or have recent news out. Finally, the stocks making considerable moves in their technical levels are clearly presented. The tables include major averages, market information such as the number of stocks at 52-week highs and lows, number of advancing and declining stocks, and the number of stocks above or below major moving averages.

Screener

The Finviz screener is an advanced tool, which allows filtering of stocks by multiple descriptive, fundamental, and technical indicators. Consequently, it can sort the data by a large number of criteria. Saving of screens can be done with a registered account.

Heat map

The Finviz map or Finviz heat map function provides a quick way to see which stocks are moving, their direction, and magnitude. It can show the S&P 500 map, world stocks map or ETF map in a variety of ways and on multiple time frames. The heat map is color-coded to easily spot outperforming or underperforming stocks. The most visited is the Finviz S&P 500 index heat map.

Conclusion

Finally, there are many options out there for technical analysis software. However, Finviz presents itself as a top prospect thanks to its efficiency for the serious trader or investor. Not only are the scans top-notch, but there’s so much more offered within the platform as well. Especially maps, top gainers/losers, portfolio tracking, backtests, news, etc. There’s no need to jump from one site to another anymore – Finviz gives you the convenience you need.