Forum Archive Index - September 2003

[Phaedrus <Phaedrus@techemail.com>]

T100,
     Screening stock fundamentals manually is fine in the NZ market, but as you 
point out, this is impractical for Australian stocks. In the USA, manually 
vetting over 10,000 stocks is an impossibility.  The utility that you need is a 
stock screener. Most on-line brokers have something, though often they provide 
very few screening parameters. You were, in fact, very close to quite a good 
screener when you gave that ninemsn URL. Go 
to:-http://investor.ninemsn.com.au/investor/Shares/finder/default.asp

This screener (they call it an "Investment Finder") has over 120 screening 
criteria. You need to be a member to access its full functionality, but it is 
free to register. They have some pre-defined searches all set up to give you 
some idea of how to create your own advanced searches. For example, a number of 
their highly ranked value stocks are companies that have had poor returns but 
have strong growth forecasts.  This query returns all companies with a high 
Value Rank, with negative total returns in the last year and with a two year 
forecast growth above 20%. Another standard screen focuses on stocks with a 
strong growth track record. These are top value stocks with EPS growth over the 
last five years above 15% and forecast growth above 20%. Another standard 
screen lists all stocks with a PE less than 10 and a PEG less than 1. You will 
develop your own preferences - for example, I like to incorporate the 
Price/Sales ratio where I can.
 As part of my screens, I filter out companies that I consider too small or too 
illiquid. I find it best not to make the screening criteria too rigorous and 
aim for a page of selected stocks, say about 50 or so. It is very fast and very 
easy to visually screen the charts of this number of stocks, from which I 
create a short list of trading candidates.
 I had a chuckle when you said "..... my bigger losers tend to be companies 
with poorer fundamentals".  My biggest losers are trades where I fail to 
implement a stop-loss!

                           Phaedrus.


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