← Markets Chart Sector Compare Screeners Symbol Lookup News Earnings Econ Calendar

Screeners

Sort and filter, your way.

Sortable tables of stocks and crypto — click any column header to rank by that metric.

Stock Screener
Cryptocurrency Market

Market data provided by TradingView and may be delayed. Shown for educational purposes only — nothing on this page is investment advice, and past performance doesn't guarantee future results.

01 — What this is

A filter, not an oracle.

A screener takes every listed company and throws away the ones that do not match numbers you picked. That is the entire function. It is worth being blunt about, because the way screeners are usually presented implies something closer to a search for good investments, and that is not what is happening.

Nothing that comes out the other end is a recommendation. It is a list of companies that happen to match arithmetic you chose. Whether that arithmetic described anything worth owning is a separate question, and the screen has no opinion on it.

Which makes the useful question not "what does the screen say" but "what did I actually ask for". Most bad screening is a bad question answered accurately. The order we teach this in — statements first, ratios last — is Fundamental Analysis.

02 — The three-filter trap

Three filters quietly pick one industry.

Set a screen for low price-to-earnings, high dividend yield and low price-to-book. Run it. You will get banks, utilities and energy companies, and you will get them almost every time.

That is not because those are the best investments available. It is because that combination is the ordinary financial shape of those industries. Banks carry low price-to-book because of how their balance sheets work. Utilities carry high yields because they are regulated and pay most of their earnings out. The screen did not find value. It found the shape you asked for.

This is the single most common way a screen misleads, and it is invisible from inside the results, because the results look like a discovery. Ratios are industry-specific, so any stack of ratio filters is implicitly an industry filter. If your output is concentrated in one sector, assume that is what you selected for until you have ruled it out.

Watch it happen

Our free Fundamentals page shows current P/E, EPS growth, revenue growth and debt-to-equity by sector, so you can see how differently these numbers behave from one industry to the next.

Proof, in today's numbers

The same ratios, sector by sector.

This is the argument above, in current data. Look at how far apart the valuation and debt figures sit across sectors — then reread your screen's filters and ask which of these you were really selecting for.

Withdrawn. This showed the sector ETF table, ranked by today's move. It came from a source whose licence does not permit us to republish it, so we took it down rather than publish a number we cannot show a right to publish. We would rather have a gap here than a figure we cannot stand behind. The rest of this page runs on public-domain government data and is unchanged.

03 — A starter screen

Three filters that are honest about themselves.

If you want somewhere defensible to begin, use this — and read the label carefully.

  1. Market cap above $2 billion. Not because small companies are bad, but because below that size a single order can move the price, results can halve or double a stock overnight, and the reported figures get thinner. It is a volatility filter more than a quality one.
  2. Debt-to-equity under 1.0. Debt is not inherently a problem — it is a problem when revenue falls and the payments do not. This filter removes the companies where an ordinary bad year becomes an existential one.
  3. Positive revenue growth. The lowest possible bar: the business is selling more than it used to. Plenty of good investments fail this at a given moment. It is a starting point, not a verdict.

That is a "reasonable ordinary businesses" screen, not a "best stocks" screen — there is no such thing as the latter, and any tool presenting itself that way is telling you something about its marketing rather than its method. Sizing what you eventually buy is a separate discipline again, covered in Trading Psychology.

04 — The blind spots

What a screen structurally cannot see.

A screener reads a database. Everything that matters and is not in that database is invisible to it — which is most of what actually decides whether a company is worth owning.

It cannot see whether a business has a moat: something that stops competitors from copying it. Being well known is not a moat. Being able to charge thirty per cent more than an equivalent product is. No ratio captures that.

It cannot see management quality — whether the people running the company allocate capital sensibly or empire-build. It cannot see accounting policy, which is where a rising profit line and a flat cash line quietly diverge. If profit is climbing while operating cash flow is not, something in the accounting is doing work the business is not, and no screen will flag it.

It cannot see a customer concentration risk, a patent cliff, a pending legal case, or a regulator's attention. All of that lives in the filings, which is why a screen is the beginning of research. Working through those documents in order is Fundamental Analysis, and the macro backdrop they sit inside is Economics.

05 — Keep going

Where to go from here.

06 — Questions

Common questions.

What is a stock screener?

A filter that reduces every listed company down to those matching numeric criteria you set. It is not a recommendation engine — the output is simply a list of companies matching arithmetic you chose.

What is a good screen for beginners?

Market cap above $2 billion, debt-to-equity under 1.0, positive revenue growth. That is a "reasonable ordinary businesses" screen. It is deliberately not a "best stocks" screen, because there is no such thing.

Why are my results all from the same industry?

Because ratios are industry-specific, so stacking filters is implicitly an industry filter. Low P/E plus high yield plus low price-to-book returns banks, utilities and energy nearly every time — that is the normal financial shape of those sectors, not a discovery.

What can a screener not tell you?

Moats, management quality, accounting aggressiveness, customer concentration, pending litigation — everything that is not a number in a database. All of it lives in the filings.

Is this free?

Free, no account needed. Data from TradingView and may be delayed. Educational purposes only, not investment advice.

Back to Markets

This screener is part of the free Markets hub — economic data, sector performance, earnings and news, refreshed daily.