Finscreener Review – Is This Stock Screener For You?

About FInscreener

Finscreener is an easy to use, flexible, and affordable stock screener. It offers a wide range of screening parameters, plus tools for strategy backtesting and portfolio analysis.

The platform is relatively basic, so traders need to have a clearly defined strategy to get much out of it. However, Finscreener’s price is hard to beat for traders who want a quick and simple way to discover potential stocks to trade.

In our Finscreener review, we’ll take a closer look at all the features this screening software offers and help you decide if it’s right for you.

Finscreener Pricing

Finscreener offers a free and paid tier. The free tier offers very limited access to the platform. You get notifications, watchlists, and historical stock data, but minimal access to the screening and visualization tools.

Finscreener Premium costs $4.99 per month or $44.99 per year. Premium subscribers get full access to all of Finscreener’s tools.

Finscreener Features

Stock Screener

Finscreener’s stock screener is the main feature of this platform, and it doesn’t disappoint. The screener features more than 100 parameters covering everything from fundamentals to financial data to technical indicators. It’s similar to the FinViz stock screener and tilts a little more towards technical filters than the Stock Rover screener.

The available fundamental and valuation filters let you sort stocks by a wide range of metrics such as asset turnover, return on equity, profit margin, expected EPS growth, enterprise value, and price-to-sales ratio. There are plenty of filters for long-term value investors, although Finscreener doesn’t calculate fair value for any stocks.

The technical filters are a little more difficult to use. You can sort stocks based on moving averages, MACD, ADX, and money flow, but you have to set specific bounds for each of these indicators. You can’t filter stocks simply based on whether an indicator is bullish or bearish. There are a number of volume filters, including for dollar volume, float, and average monthly volume, but no filters for short interest.

Finscreener also lets you filter stocks according to its own proprietary stock ratings. The platform assigns stocks scores of 1-5 for valuation, growth potential, and income generation, plus uses automated technical analysis to rate stocks as buy or sell based on short-term price movements.

Finally, Finscreener lets you screen stocks according to common technical chart patterns such as head and shoulder patterns, rising and falling wedges, and upward or downward channels.

You can save an unlimited number of custom screens.

Screen results are displayed in a table that has several preset display options for performance, valuation, and technical analysis. You can’t customize the columns, but you can sort screen results by any of the available columns.

Fast Screener

The fast screener is a simplified stock screener that lets you choose a market and just a single filter parameter. A results table can be sorted by one-day performance, volume, and potential gain based on analyst price targets.

The fast screener is faster to use than Finscreener’s comprehensive stock screener, but it doesn’t feel like it adds much value. Most traders will be better served by creating saved screens than using the fast screener.

Stock Ideas

Finscreener has several features to help traders discover new stocks to trade and invest in.

First, the platform offers several premade screens. These include screens for top dividend stocks, momentum stocks, overbought and oversold stocks, and penny stocks. Each of the screens can be further filtered by market, industry, or any of Finscreener’s technical and valuation-based filters. Finscreener also has a premade screener for stocks that it ranks highly for growth, value, and income (similar to Seeking Alpha’s screeners).

Finscreener also has screens based on Wall Street analyst ratings. You can filter stocks based on whether the consensus recommendation is a strong buy, buy, hold, sell, or strong sell. Once again, you can narrow down the premade screen with any of Finscreener’s available filter parameters.

Another useful tool is the earnings ratings screener. This uses current earnings revisions and earnings surprises from the previous quarter to highlight stocks that might surpass expectations for the next quarter’s reported earnings. An earnings estimate tracker lets you monitor how earnings estimates have changed for stocks over the past 90 days.

You can also track insider trades with Finscreener. This tool isn’t as helpful for monitoring insider trades across the market since it’s wrapped into Finscreener’s screening tools. However, it can be useful if you want to check for insider trades around stocks that have passed on of your saved screens.

Stock Analysis

All of the data that Finscreener incorporates into its screener is available to view for individual stocks. What’s great about the platform’s stock analysis is that it uses color-coded bars to compare a company’s financials and technical performance against the S&P 500 and the company’s industry. This makes it easy to see at a glance where a company is strong and where it is weak.

Finscreener also offers chart from TradingView, so you can conduct basic technical analysis right inside the platform.

Backtesting

The strategy backtester is another highlight of Finscreener. You can create custom strategies to backtest, import any of your saved screens, or choose from a handful of technical indicator-based strategies. You can backtest against an entire market or any subset of ticker symbols you choose. Historical data is available going back to 1998.

The backtest results include your profit and loss, the number of trades, your maximum drawdown, and the correlation between the tickers included in your test. You can also view the individual trades for each ticker.

Whereas some backtesting tools (like Trade Ideas) are good for active traders, Finscreener’s backtesting tool is particularly effective for swing traders and investors.

Finscreener Ease of Use

Finscreener is fairly easy to use and offers a few basic customization options. Most important, you can save an unlimited number of custom screens and use them as the basis for backtesting. You can also create an unlimited number of portfolios and watchlists. Finscreener also offers “My Desk,” a customizable workspace where you can view pre-made modules like top gainers and losers, an earnings calendar, and stocks trading with unusual volume.

Finscreener also offers highly customizable alerts. Alerts can be based on any combination of fundamental and technical parameters that are available in the stock screener. Notifications are sent to your email.

Finscreener Differentiators

Finscreener offers a fairly comprehensive stock screener that’s packed with fundamental, valuation-based, and technical parameters. While some of the technical filters can be tricky to use effectively, this is overall one of the best stock screeners around – especially when you consider Finscreener’s highly affordable price tag. The backtesting module adds to Finscreener’s usefulness, as do the tools for finding potential earnings surprises and stocks experiencing insider trading. 

Few of the tools within Finscreener are unique, and traders can get much of the same functionality from platforms like FinViz or StockRover. FinViz offers better visualizations of screen results, but Finscreener wins out in terms of overall parameter options and customizability. StockRover is the best choice for fundamental stock screening, but it has far fewer technical filters than Finscreener.

What Type of Trader is Finscreener Best For?

FInscreener is best suited for swing traders and active investors. The platform’s screener makes it easy to combine fundamental analysis to find worthy investments with technical analysis to find the best time to open a position.

Traders and investors using Finscreener will need to have their own strategies. The platform offers tools for generating trade ideas, but it’s far from being a stock-picking service or even offering a shortlist of highly actionable ideas. The strategy backtester can help traders and investors optimize their strategies.