Glossary
Stock Screener
A tool that narrows a long list of companies down to the ones meeting conditions you set, such as a size band or a sector.
There are roughly six thousand publicly traded companies in the US, which is more than anybody can read about. A screener cuts that to a list short enough to look at, by taking a set of conditions and returning only the companies that meet all of them at once.
The ConvictionStocks screener filters on sector, market cap band, and whether a price sits above or below its 50 or 200 day exponential moving average, then sorts what survives by market cap, price, daily change or name. It deliberately holds no proprietary score and no ranking of quality, because a score would be a verdict rather than a filter.
A screener can only work with numbers a database already holds, which is its real limit. It cannot see a management team, a lawsuit nobody has filed yet, or a product people have started to dislike. The course's screener lesson treats the output as a list of candidates to research rather than as an answer, and notes that filters set tight enough to return two results have usually excluded more than they found.
Learn this properly
Lesson 11: How to Use a Stock ScreenerA stock screener filters thousands of stocks down to the ones worth researching. Here's how to use one effectively without getting overwhelmed.
Related terms
- SectorOne of the broad industry groups a stock market is divided into, such as technology, health care, energy, or financials.
- Mega, Large, Mid and Small CapThe size bands companies get sorted into by market cap, running from mega at the top down to small at the bottom.
- EMA (Exponential Moving Average)A moving average that weights recent days more heavily than older ones, so it turns sooner than a plain average of the same length.
- Moving AverageThe average closing price over a fixed number of recent days, recalculated daily so it moves along with the price.
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