Want to Discover Great Stocks? Here Are 7 of the Best Free Stock Screeners to Try in 2020

At Seedly, we are all for doing your due diligence when it comes to investing and a key part of this is doing research on stocks.

Once you have your investment strategy in place, the next step is to find a great stock screener that can help you discover new stocks efficiently.

Typically, finding new stocks can be quite a time-consuming process.

However, you can save time by using stock screeners, a tool which helps investors screen and narrow down stocks based on user-defined metrics.

Like our list of best investment portfolio tracking apps & platforms in Singapore, this list zeroes in on the best free stock screeners for casual investors.

Admittedly the paid stock screeners have more features and more filter criteria.

But for most of us, these free stock screeners do an adequate job.

Best part? It’s FREE which means that you won’t have to pay subscription fees to eat into your investment returns.

As such we have curated this list of the best free stock screeners and will be evaluating them based on the following qualities:

• User interface
• Range of filter criteria
• Fundamental and Technical data on stock
• Extra functionality

TL;DR: 7 of the Best Free Stock Screeners

1. Stockscafe Stock Screener

To start things off, we will be looking at StocksCafe a platform popular amongst Singaporean retail investors.

The platform allows you to track and monitor your portfolio, better understand a company and discover interesting stocks.

For the purpose of this article, we will be focusing on the StocksCafe stock screener.

The screener covers the numerous stocks listed in Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong Japan and the United States.

Do note that you will need to create a free account to access it.

When you click on the screener, you will be greeted with this:

The user interface is pretty straightforward as you can easily filter by exchange, sector and almost every metric you can think of. With this you can create a highly personalised stock screener.

However, it is a bit tedious to add the filter criteria as you have to add them one by one instead of selecting a few at one go.. But this is where it gets interesting.

There is a really broad range of filter criteria that gives you a good mix of fundamental and technical data about the stocks.

You have everything from operating cash flow count, 5 year EPS growth, the Altman Z-Score, annualised historical returns (1 – 10 years), cash flow per share moving average convergence divergence (MACD), tangible book value per share and more.

What is cool about this screener is the community element.

If you are intimidated by the many filter criteria, you can start off by using the shared screeners which are based on proven ways to look for stocks as well as user-contributed screeners.

But as with anything investing, do your own due diligence.

Once you have found stocks that met your own criteria, you can use the analysis tools for information like price graphs, financial data, dividend history, daily price etc.

Even though the learning curve is a bit steep and the adding of filter criteria a bit tedious, the StocksCafe stock screener is still a powerful tool for investors if you take the time to learn it.

2. Investing.com Stock Screener — Global Stock Markets

Next up we have the Investing.com stock screener which covers the global markets with stock information from Argentina all the way to Zimbabwe.

What I liked about this stock screener is that the user interface is really intuitive.

For example, when selecting filter criteria, there is an easy to use the slider for me to adjust the range of the P/E ratio. It’s little things like this that make the difference.

What I like about this screener is that it has a good range of filter criteria that are neatly grouped. You can filter equity by:

• Country, exchange, sector, industry and equity types
• Ratios like the P/E Ratio, Price to Book Ratio (MRQ) etc.
• Price
• Dividends
• Volume
• Fundamental and Technical criteria.

As for the fundamental data about the stock, you have indicators like Market Cap, Quick Ratio, Total Debt to Equity and more.

Whereas for the technical data about the stock you have indicators like the ADX indicator, Bull/Bear Power, Williams%R momentum indicator and more.

The screener also provides historical average annual return data as far back as three years.

The cool thing about this screener is that it displays candlestick pattern graphs that pack data for multiple time frames into single price bars

However, one of the downsides of this screener is that its range of available filter criteria is not that wide.

The mobile version is not the best, but you can download their Investing.com app to try.

Otherwise, this is a good stock screener to consider.

3. MSN Money Stock Screener – Global Stock Markets

Remember the days of using MSN messenger and the iconic message tone? Turns out MSN has a stock screener as well.

The MSN Money Stock Screener covers stocks from Argentina to Vietnam. There are noticeably fewer countries compared to Investing.com but with almost 50 unique worldwide markets, you are still spoilt for choice.

What I like about this stock screener is that it has a clean modern-looking user interface that is the best looking so far.

The user interface is quite familiar as the filter criteria is put at the side like many popular online shopping sites.

Speaking of filter criteria you can select from criteria categorised under:

• Country, exchange, sector and analyst rating.
• Key statistics
• Price change indicators
• Growth indicators
• Financial health indicators
• Profitability indicators
• Revenues/Net Income indicators
• Price ratios
• Estimates.

As for data, the MSN stock screener provides mainly fundamental data.

What’s cool about this is that there are seven preset screens where you can choose from if you are not sure what filters to include.

Although the MSN Money stock screener looks good, there are some downsides.

Firstly, the range of filter criteria is lacking. More specifically, there is a lack of technical data indicators about the stocks.

You also cannot save or share your own personalised stock screens or download the stock screens as well.

Still, this stock screener might be useful for beginner investors who want to get familiar before using the stock screeners with more features.

4. Yahoo Finance Stock Screener — Global Stock Markets

Another beginner-friendly stock screener to try out is the Yahoo Finance stock screener.

Even though this stock screener has a lack of technical and fundamental filter criteria, it is simple and easy to use.

The user interface is clean, modern looking and not as intimidating as some other screeners.

What I like about this screener is that it covers stocks from 60 over countries and their exchanges

You can select filter criteria categorised by:

• Share statistics
• Balance sheet
• Income
• Valuation measures
• Cash flow statement
• Dividends and splits
• Environmental social and governance (ESG) scores
• Earnings
• Financial highlights
• Sector and industry.

There are even free streaming quotes and your searches will include popular Yahoo Finance fundamental data.

What’s cool about this screener is that the search results can be viewed as a heatmap.

The bigger companies take up more space on the heatmap while the performance is indicated by the colour of the block.

The screener also has some preset finance screeners for you to use.

However, what I don’t like about this screener is that is has a small list of criteria available for screening with many criteria such as “Rate of Return” and “Valuation” needing a premium subscription. There is also no data exporting supported.

This is more suited for beginner investors who want to get more comfortable with stock screening.

5. Finviz Stock Screener — U.S. Stock Markets

Now for more focused stock screeners.

First up we have the Finviz stock screener which covers stocks on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), American Stock Exchange (AMEX) and the NASDAQ.

What I liked about the screener is that the user interface is clean and quite intuitive to use. A cool thing about this stock screener is that when you hover you mouse over the ticker, a performance chart pops up, allowing you to see the stock performance at a glance.

It also has a broad range of filter criteria that are neatly grouped under the Descriptive, Fundamental and Technical categories.

The data you can find on the stock is also quite extensive with a wide range of fundamental and technical data about the stock.

I also liked that the user interface is clean and quite intuitive to use. A cool thing about this stock screener is that when you hover you mouse over the ticker, a performance chart pops up, allowing you to see the stock performance at a glance.

However, the downsides of this screener are that you are unable to filter only ETFs or stocks.

The screener is also not mobile-friendly as you are basically accessing the desktop version on mobile, which makes it very hard to navigate.

In addition, the other more advanced features like data exporting, customised filters and backtesting are only available to paying subscribers.

6. Dr Wealth Screener — Asia Pacific Stock Markets.

Next up with have the Dr Wealth screener which covers the following markets:

• Shanghai
• Shenzhen
• Hong Kong
• Indonesia
• Japan
• South Korea
• Malaysia
• New Zealand
• Philippines
• Singapore
• Taiwan
• Thailand
• Vietnam.

The screener works best on mobile as a web app but it looks good on the desktop as well.

What I like about this screener is that the interface is very clean, modern and responsive.

Overall it has a pretty good user-experience but there is room for improvement as finding the filter criteria is not as intuitive.

I had to first click the filter button to select the country and click again to one of the categories before I could scroll all the way down to customise the filter criteria.

Speaking of filter criteria, the screener has an extensive range of 50 financial metrics with a good mix of fundamental and technical indicators for users to choose from.

I could also see a useful chart next to the metric.

The cool thing about this screener is that you can access 6 different strategy screens for a start. You can also add stocks to your watchlist and based on what you select, your newsfeed will be populated with related news, articles and more.

The best part is you do not have to create an account although it would be more convenient and you can create a temporary watchlist this way.

Aside from the unintuitive user experience when searching, I would think that this is overall a pretty good stock screener to use.

7. SGX Stock Screener – Singapore Stock Market

Last but not least we have the Singapore Exchange (SGX) stock screener. This is the stock screener for investors who want in-depth information about SGX stocks.

As the SGX Investor Portal was recently revamped I have high expectations for this stock screener.

The user interface is pretty modern and intuitive as I had no trouble figuring it out even though I have not used the revamped website before.

As for the filter criteria, you can filter stocks according to different criteria such as sector, revenue, market capitalisation, price-to-earnings ratio, dividend yield, and return on equity etc.

To access this, you will simply have to click the “1” button the left navigation panel and press “Filter” button (shown as “2”) on the top right-hand corner of the page.

Once you find a stock you desire, you can find out more information about the stock such as its’:

• Price movement over the last five years
• Overview of the stock such as its previous closing price, shares outstanding, and 52-week high/low price
• Valuation of the company
• Business background of the company
• Financial statements from the last five fiscal years
• Company announcements
• and more.

A cool thing about this is that once you’ve decided to buy the share, you can just log in to your brokerage account to buy that share.

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