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A program allowing you to search the entire market for those stocks or mutual funds that meet your particular selection requirements is called a screener. For example, you coulduse a screener to list all stocks with price-to-earnings ratios of 20 to 30, and yearly sales of more than $40 billion.
"Business Week" has killed their free screener program, as has Reuters. Fortunately, MSN's free Money Deluxe Screener is an excellent tool for divining the market. In case you want to see what the screens look like before inputting your specific data, you can click on MSN's Power Stock Screen to see predefined screens. Their technical screens search for stocks based on patterns in their price or volume, while their fundamental screens focus on sales, profits, and other business factors of the underlying companies.
You can find MSN's screener on its homepage by selecting Investing and then Stock Screener. Download the free screener program by clicking on the Deluxe Stock Screener link. But only if you're using Internet Explorer; it won't work with any non-Microsoft browsers.
Other free screeners include those offered by Yahoo! Finance, CNBC.com, Zacks Custom Screener, AOL's Money & Finance, and Morningstar Free Screener. Now, obviously, these devices aren't going to hold your hand and whisper the name of the one stock that's going to make you into the JP Morgan of the current century. They are just tools, simplifying your search for specific information. How you construe that information is up to you.
This is what Zacks has to say about screening for Growth & Income: Growth and income investing is sometimes seen as the "buy and hold" form of investing. Typically, investors in this investing style hold larger cap, or blue chip, stocks for a year or longer. Those stocks must pay a dividend in order to achieve the income component of the strategy.
Historically, for growth & income investing, investors would screen for stocks with some earnings growth and, of course, income in the form of a dividend. Growth & income investors might also like to screen for companies that are seeing earnings strength and sales growth and that have a larger market cap, as large cap companies are more likely to pay consistent dividends than smaller cap companies. Return on equity, or ROE, can also be a good screening tool for growth and income companies. |
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