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Finviz Stock Screener Review – How Does This Scanner Rank?

By Dave

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Finviz Review

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FinViz Review

  • Screeners
  • Charts
  • Value
  • Features
  • Ease of Use
4.2

Summary

FinViz is one of the top browser-based stock screeners, offering a variety of powerful market research tools. The site features powerful scanning tools, beautiful charts, and advanced technical analysis tools. Read the review to see how to make the most of FinViz

About Finviz

Finviz is a browser-based stock market research platform that offers useful technical and fundamental tools for both traders and investors. Finviz is short for financial visualizations, which perfectly describes this site. Finviz is packed with unique data views, charts, and heat maps. It also offers stats, a stock screener, news headlines, and social media streams.

It can take a bit of acclimation to get used to Finviz. But the sheer volume of resources make this platform a virtual one-stop shop for finding trading and investing opportunities in the stock, futures, and forex markets.

Finviz offers both a free version and a paid version (Finviz Elite). There’s no doubt that the free version is packed with great features, but Finviz Elite offers even more tools. So, is the paid subscription worth the money? Keep reading our FinViz review to find out.

finviz

Finviz Pricing Options

There are three membership plans at Finviz: Free, Registered, and Elite.

The Free plan provides access to a majority of Finviz’s tools, including interactive charts, data visualizations, and screens. The catch is that data is delayed by up to five minutes. There are also no intraday charts, portfolios, or screener presets with an unregistered free account.

The Registered plan requires you to sign up with your email, but it’s still free. Registered users get access to 50 stock screener presets, portfolio tickers, and portfolios. You can also save your stock screeners which is a nice added benefit.

The Finviz Elite plan provides real-time and pre-market quotes, advanced charts, screening with intraday charting, technical studies, backtests, correlation analysis, and email alerts. It also includes up to 100 portfolios, tickers, and screener presets, plus eliminates all of the advertisements on the site.

Finviz Elite costs $39.50 a month or $299.50 if you pay for the whole year upfront. This is relatively inexpensive when compared to other scanners. We will discuss whether or not it is actually worth it in our Finviz Elite review.

Finviz Features

Finviz is an all-in-one stock market research website with tools for day trading, swing trading, and investing. Whether you’re a day trader or an investor, you’ll find helpful features in this platform.

Let’s take a closer look.

News

News headlines on Finviz are extracted from numerous free news feeds including PR Newswire, Briefing.com, MarketWatch, Bloomberg, CNN, NBC, and Wall Street Journal. Blog headlines are aggregated from sources like Seeking Alpha, Motley Fool, Zero Hedge, Vantage Point Trading, Mish Talk, Calculated Risk, Ritholtz, and Daily Reckoning.

Finviz definitely offers one of the better free market newsfeeds. It’s easy to scan the headlines and see which sources they came from. I find it to be a lot easier to use than the newsfeed on Yahoo Finance, for example.

News Streamer

Heat Maps

Finviz’s heat maps are handy visualizations that give traders and investors a bird’s-eye view of the sectors and stocks experiencing noteworthy price action. They can be accessed from the homepage or directly from the “Maps” page on the site.

Heat maps can be filtered by:

  • S&P 500
  • ETFs
  • World markets
  • Full stock market

From there, the heat maps can be organized according to metrics like:

  • 1 Day Performance
  • 1 Week Performance
  • 1 Year Performance
  • P/E
  • Relative Volume
  • PEG
  • Dividend Yield
  • And more

The heat maps section offers one of the best visualizations on the site. You can use this tool to gauge the overall health of the market and find top winners and top losers in any sector.

Most people stick with the default performance breakdown, but the additional filters provide a ton of valuable insights. For example, investors can use the “Dividend Yield” view to find stocks with the best annual yields. Active stock traders can use the “Relative Volume” view to find the most liquid stocks.

FinViz-Heat-Maps

I didn’t realize how useful heat maps are until I started using them on Finviz. The depth of each sector and the leading gainers and losers in those sectors are displayed in a visually and logically appealing format. There is also an option to display the heat map data in bubbles, but I prefer the squares.

The best part of the heat maps module is that it is completely free. While Finviz Elite subscribers have access to real-time market data, free users have access to the same visualizations with data delayed by 3-5 minutes. This delay isn’t a big deal for most heat map analyses.

Sector Performance Tools

FinViz offers quick visualization tools for analyzing sector performance under the “Groups” tab of the website. This tool breaks down performance into groups, including specific sectors, industries, and themes. Groups can be segmented by order based on fundamental performance metrics like P/E, market capitalization, EPS, and price/cash, to name a few. Traders can see where the money is flowing and then delve deeper into the group to find individual stocks worth trading.

This tool is incredibly helpful for seeing which sectors are performing well across long-term and short-term timeframes.

FinViz Sectors

Insider Sales Tracking

The “Insider” tab of the website provides insider trading information to help traders get a jump on potential price action. Stocks often move on insider trading data, especially when top executives buy or sell shares on the open market.

Finviz is an excellent resource for finding potential trades based on top insider trades. The table isn’t as visual as some of the platform’s other tools, but it’s very useful for investors who make decisions based on a company’s management and insider transactions.

There are stock market services like InsiderCow that are built solely around trading insider trading activity. On Finviz, this is just one of many features.

Futures

The futures tab provides heat maps for equity, commodities, and currencies futures. It’s a great overview of the futures market. The maps make it easy to visualize correlations between the various futures contracts. You can check the performance of global markets, crude oil, commodities, and currencies. I like to use the Finviz futures feature after market hours to see how the market may perform the next day.

The website has similar heat maps for the forex and crypto markets.

Stock Market Futures

Portfolio tracking

Users can create custom portfolios or watch list to simply tracking and monitoring specific stocks. Finviz tallies up the total performance and dollar gain or loss for each portfolio, which is really convenient. I like to use the portfolio management tools to create segmented watch lists like “momentum stocks” and “swing trades.”

Stock Screeners

We saved the best part of our Finviz review for last.

The stock screener is the crown jewel of this service and easily its most valuable feature. Finviz offers one of the best free stock scanners on the market today.

The screener is incredibly versatile and flexible, even for free users. Honestly, Finviz could hold its own as a standalone stock screener, even if it eliminated all of its visualizations and market monitoring tools.

The screener is used by veteran day traders, such as Nathan Michaud at Investors Underground.

The stock screener is relatively easy to use and allows users to create scans using an impressive variety of filters.

  • Descriptive filters like market cap, industry, volume, dividend yield, and short float.
  • Fundamental filters like P/E, Price/Cash, EPS, Quick Ratio, and institutional ownership.
  • Technical filters like 20-day simple moving average, RSI, ATR, volatility, and candlestick. A “pattern” filter lets you search for classic technical patterns like wedges, cup and handles, head and shoulders, triangles, and double tops and bottoms.

The Signal dropdown includes the patterns as well as top gainers and losers, insider buying, unusual volume, and much more. The charts show trend channels and 50/200 period simple moving averages. Results can be displayed by symbols, charts, or snapshots, which include fundamentals, news, and company summaries along with technical charts.

Custom scans can be created and saved depending on the type of plan you are signed up for. You can create your own custom scans using a variety of technical indicators and fundamental data points. The combination of filters combined with the trend lines and added technical tools make this an amazing resource. Once acclimated, you can put together some amazingly precise screens for very specific results.

Finviz Screener

The scan results are clean and easy to analyze. The results are just as impressive as the scans themself. You can view results in table format or as charts with pre-annotated technical analysis.

The scans themself are straightforward but powerful. I found them easier to use than other online scanning platforms like StockFetcher and ChartMill.

Most traders I know have used the free stock screener from Finviz at least once. This begs the question, “is the Finviz Elite screener worth it?”

The Finviz stock screener is one of the best free trading tools on the market. For many traders, the free stock screener will be sufficient. That said, there are a few good reasons to upgrade to the Finviz Elite stock screener:

  1. Get Access to Real-Time Data – The Finviz Elite stock screener allows you to screen stocks in real-time. While delayed data may be sufficient for scanning outside of market hours, you will definitely want real-time data if you plan to use Finviz intraday.
  2. More Customization – The Finviz Elite stock screener provides more customization options. You can save more presets, view more results per page, export results, and so on. If you find yourself hitting the limits on the Finviz free plan, it may be worth upgrading.

Stock Research

Finviz provides access to research tools that can be helpful for traders who want to dig deeper into the results of their best stock screeners.

The Finviz stock market portal is a data goldmine and the platform offers key data points for individual stocks. Once you create a scan and find stocks that you’d like to research further, Finviz provides an effective tool for analyzing key data points. The stock market portal offers a ton of data that can help you make better trading decisions.

Traders can get access to important market data points like:

  • Company revenue
  • Market cap
  • Income
  • Dividends
  • EPS
  • Share structure (i.e., outstanding shares and float)
  • Short interest
  • Stock price performance
  • Technical data
  • And much more!
FinViz Stock Research

Finviz also provides access to advanced charting.  You can choose between candlestick charts, bar charts, technical charts, and more. While we wouldn’t consider Finviz to be a standalone charting platform for performing deep technical analysis, the stock charts are great for quick analysis and research. It is clear that the advanced charts are not an afterthought.

What Type of Trader is Finviz Best For?

Finviz.com has resources for traders and investors of all skill levels. The depth of the tool is amazing, especially with the free access if you can handle the non-stop video pop-up ads. The value is great for the monthly service, which allows for intraday data.

Most traders will be impressed by the sheer number of useful tools, including one of the best multi-filter screeners on the market.

Best of all, some of the most powerful tools in the platform are available for free. This can be great for traders who don’t have access to a stock screener through their brokers (like Robinhood) or premium scanners like EquityFeed.

Finviz is one of the few services where the free service is so good that you may not even need to pay for the premium subscription. Personally, I use other scanners like Trade Ideas for my intraday trading, but find that Finviz is excellent for creating watch lists and finding information on companies.

I love the Finviz scanner because it allows you to view the charts for each stock that shows up in the scan results. This saves me a ton of time when creating watch lists. Even though Finviz isn’t a standalone charting platform, the charts are impressive. I prefer them to standalone platforms like StockCharts.com, especially when it comes to analyzing scan results.

Finviz Scan Results

As mentioned above, you can also get a ton of information on individual stocks, such as float, short volume, and more.

You can read about how FinViz compares to other platforms in the guides below:

Is Finviz Elite Worth It?

So far, our review has been primarily focused on the free Finviz service. Now, it’s time to take a look at the Finviz Elite plan.

Finviz Elite is very similar to the free version of the service but it has fewer restrictions and offers access to real-time quotes.

Finviz Elite is a premium service that offers a few additional benefits. These core benefits include:

  • Real-time Data (as opposed to delayed data)
  • Advanced charts
  • Advanced scans
  • Intraday charts
  • Fundamental charts
  • Email alerts
  • Proprietary correlation algorithms
  • More preset scans
  • More portfolios
  • More customizations

Here is a full comparison of the Free, Registered, and Finviz Elite plans:

Finviz Plan Comparison

Elite users enjoy an ad-free experience (which seems to alleviate the biggest complaint from free users). There’s no doubt that the ads on the Finviz site are intrusive. If you use the site regularly it may be worth paying for an Elite subscription just to get rid of those ads.

Finviz Elite Backtesting

Finviz Elite users also have backtesting capabilities that allow them to backtest strategies using 16 years of historical data. You can use all of Finviz’s built-in technical indicators, including the pattern recognition features.

It’s really easy to build backtests in Finviz and design strategies that appear to beat the market. But a major flaw is that you can’t see the individual trades that went into the backtest or details like your maximum drawdown or biggest win.

Backtesting in Finviz Elite is nice to have for some trading strategies, but it’s a little hard to trust the results without being able to dig into them.

Should You Pay for Finviz Elite?

The Elite plan is priced at $39.50/month or $299.50/year (which equates to $24.96/month). The question is, is it worth it?

First things first, if you’re going to sign up for the Elite service, you should lock in the yearly rate. The prepaid annual subscription is 36% cheaper than the monthly subscription.

As for whether or not the Elite service is worth it, you need to consider how you plan on using the service.

How do you plan on using Finviz? Personally, I only use Finviz for running scans after the market closes. These scans make it easy to build watch lists for the next day. I use a standalone trading platform for intraday charting and scanners. I can’t see Finviz replacing a desktop stock scanner like Trade Ideas and EquityFeed.

Since I only use the Finviz stock screener after hours, I have no need for real-time data, nor do I need any of the other Elite features. I also prefer desktop stock scanners to web-based scanners (for real-time scans).

This is one of the rare cases where the free version of a service is so good that I can’t justify paying for the premium version. It would be nice to get rid of those pesky ads, but that’s not enough to push me to upgrade.

That said, some traders may benefit from real-time data and advanced scanning options. We were favorably impressed by everything we uncovered in our Finviz review.

If you’re on the fence, I would recommend starting with a one-month subscription to the service. Every subscription is backed by a 30-day money-back guarantee, so if you are unhappy, your purchase is protected.

Finviz FAQs

Is Finviz data delayed?

Free and Registered users receive data that’s delayed by 5 minutes in Finviz. This isn’t a big deal for investors or for after-market screening, but it does matter for intraday trading. Finviz Elite users get access to real-time data.

What assets does Finviz include?

Finviz is primarily designed for stock analysis, but the platform also has visualizations for the forex, crypto, and futures markets.

Does Finviz have alerts?

Finviz Elite offers price alerts and news alerts. You can also receive a notification when a new ticker fits the criteria for one of your saved screens.

Pros

  • Amazing screener with preset technical pattern scans
  • Great heat maps and insider trading feeds
  • Stable and fast results
  • Relatively easy to use
  • Great depth of detailed technical and fundamental information on stocks
  • Portfolio tracking and custom screens can be configured and saved
  • Great for all types of trading, including swing trading, day trading, and investing

Cons

  • Homepage design could use streamlining
  • Video ads can be quite annoying with the free service
Day Trade Review

Dave

Dave has been a part-time day trader and swing trader since 2011 when he first became obsessed with the markets. He focuses primarily on technical setups and will hold positions anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. Over his trading career, Dave has tried numerous day trading products, brokers, services, and courses. He continues to test and review new day trading services to this day.

5 thoughts on “Finviz Stock Screener Review – How Does This Scanner Rank?”

  1. Just getting started. Need the screener to find stocks to buy. There are tons of people wanting to sell me on how to make millions but I want to learn how myself. Thanks for the free stock screener. Don’t know much about setting it up but will learn.

    Reply
    • There’s a big price difference. Trade Ideas is a more robust platform with advanced features. I also prefer the desktop platform to the online platform.

      If you just need a basic scanning tool with realtime data, Finviz will do the trick. Try to test Trade Ideas during one of their quarterly test drives (there’s one going on now) and see which platform you prefer.

      Reply
  2. My experience is very bad with finviz. Please be aware of their subscription plan and avoid falling into the trap like me. Before subscribing they mentioned that if I don’t want I can close the subscription any time and I will charged by monthly rate and refund the remaining amount. After an year, it was automatically subscribed for an year and I notice that from billing, As I am not active into stocks, I tried cancelling it. only 9 days into the plan. I contacted customer care ( who don’t provide any phone number to discuss) on 11/9/2018 and never got any response. Again on Dec 13, 2018 I contact him again for the refund, the guy Alex Patek responded as follows

    Hello V,
    We offer a full refund during the initial 30-day period only, no subscription payments are refundable after the initial 30-day period is over. The official refund policy and other information regarding the FINVIZ*Elite service is available here:
    http://elite.finviz.com/help/faq.ashx
    Should you have any further questions please let me know.

    I had asked for number to discuss and resolve issue and he never provided one. This is a cheating business model with hidden cost. Please be aware of their intentions. I don’t have any other intentions other than educating people about this bad subscription plan

    Reply
  3. I got Elite and If I am not wrong the pattern scanner only find patterns on daily time frame, It seems there is not intraday pattern scanner. I felt very upset so far.

    Reply

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