(Some of you may have seen an initial version of this message earlier today after an inadvertent mouse click. If you did, read again as there's more!)
Now that we've "mastered" the basics of the StockCentral Screener, let's add a few bell and whistles!
If you saved your Drug Store screen, open it up again. Click the My Saved Screens link, and then click View Results. If you didn't save the screen, just make a new screen with the selected industry as Drug Stores. Now let's add some more data to the table.
Click Edit Current Screen at the bottom of the page.
For the Size criterion, click "micro" as the minimum size and leave the maximum size set to "Any." Effectively, this tells the screener that you want to any company size, but in the Drug Store industry. Click Find Stocks and the new results table now includes a column that shows the company's size -- revenues for the most recent year.
Sorting
Have you noticed that the column headings are underlined? They function as links, and if you click on them, the results table gets sorted according to the data in the columm. Click the Company Size heading once and the companies will be sorted in descending order of size. Click again, and the companies are displayed from smallest to largest.
Have you noticed that the screening criteria are listed at the top of the results page?
Add more columns
Continue by setting the minimum Historical 5-year EPS Growth Rate to zero, and also do the same for the minimum Historical 5-year Sales Growth Rate. Now, when you click Find Stocks, you'll also be able to see these two values for your selected companies.
A "real" screen
Now it's time to make a screen that might be more useful. I'm interested in companies with good historical sales growth and EPS growth rates, and with straight-line EPS growth. To do this, I'll first click Reset to start over. Then I pick:
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R2 items are generated in the process of calculating growth. R2 is a measure of consistent year-over-year results. It provides a good screening item for determining the quality (consistency) of growth. The R2 value varies from 0 to 1, with 1 indicating excellent consistency. A value of R2 > 0.9 would be considered very consistent. A value of R2 < 0.6 would be considered very inconsistent. ")" class="lineup" id="dnn_ctr667_main_epsr2" style="cursor: help;"> EPS R2 5-Year: minimum - 0.9, maximum - any
On clicking Find Stocks I get a list of 20 companies, and there is a new feature at the bottom of the page: the "Pager" that lets me see the rest of the companies that meet my three criteria. Since there are 9 pages available, I've got between 161 and 180 companies (20 per page, but the last page might not have 20 companies -- there are 3 -- so it's really 163 companies.
To narrow things down again, I'll Edit Current Screen, selecting criteria that are proxies for good management:
- ROE Trend: minimum - even, maximum - any
- Pretax Profit Margin Trend: minimum - even, maximum - any
Now I have 106 companies.
At this point, I'd encourage you to "play around" with other screening criteria to see how all of this works.
Tomorrow will be devoted to a single criterion: Take Stock Quality Rating. |