Stock Screeners - Your Thoughts Please

[Rhody Trader]

I'm looking to improve upon the stock screening processes I've got in place at the moment. I'd love to get feedback from those of you who are using them.

Here are my needs:

• 
  
  [*]US market (stocks, indices and ETFs)
  [*]Allows customized indicators and will run scans based on them
  [*]Produces customizable reports which can be exported to a text file or Excel (or maybe some other option)
  [*]Updates EOD data shortly after the close, not a couple hours later.​

Any thoughts on the subject, including preferred data feeds for the screeners you use, will be helpful.

 

[henry766]

What do you use at present ? For end of day screening metastock is probably way to go , intraday has to be tradestation radarscreen , I think some use excel , which i'm looking at myself at moment ( very usefull for pairs i believe).

 

[Rhody Trader]

I'm mainly using Tradecision right now, which does run the screens I want, but the EOD data is coming from Yahoo. It's spotty in terms of quality and doesn't update in a real timely manner after the close.

As far as I can tell, Metastock doesn't output the results the way I need - tabular format. I'm not using the most recent version, though, so maybe it's different now, or I'm just not seeing how to do it.

I need to do post screen manipulations for presentation purposes, which I do in Excel, but the amount of data I'm dealing with is too massive to easily run through a spreadsheet. I'm running literally thousands of symbols for the work I do.

 

[Lightning McQueen]

Hi Rhody Trader

You really must check out ProRealTime : Real Time Technical Analysis Software

It ticks most of the boxes for your requirements, best of all its free for EOD.

cheers

Lightning

 

[Rhody Trader]

You really must check out ProRealTime : Real Time Technical Analysis Software

It ticks most of the boxes for your requirements, best of all its free for EOD.

I checked that out. Interesting application which could be quite useful under other circumstances, but it doesn't appear to offer the ability to export the screen results which I need to be able to do.

 

[henry766]

It's pretty easy to export the results (metastock)( atleast in terms of a symbol list /data file) to excel i believe , the data is the very best with symbol lists and auto adjustment for splits etc and is available in full within an hour , that said not perfect but easiest i've used for end of day .

 

[Rhody Trader]

It's pretty easy to export the results (metastock)( atleast in terms of a symbol list /data file) to excel i believe , the data is the very best with symbol lists and auto adjustment for splits etc and is available in full within an hour , that said not perfect but easiest i've used for end of day .

First question is what version are you using?

Second question is how do you do the export?

When I was trying to do something like that I couldn't find a way to do it. Maybe I just didn't look in the right place, though.

 

[henry766]

I think i'm version 9 , but i think most are similer ,on reports page of scan you can save list to a folder , and or right mouse click on the securities you wish to save ( probably after sorting using/ pressing on "column to sort into correct scanned order by results ), after right clicking on these they turn blue depending on how many you want , right click menu has save to file , or copy to file ( and stuff like add to favorites). Anyway once you have a file of securities you've scanned (results) then use downloader and "convert" to excel in new file which you should then be able to access from excel i believe . It's possible earlier than 9 doesn't use windows files ( been a while) which might be problematic , good luck with it

 

[tradinghumble]

Build your own

I've built my own scanner using Excel... not extremely difficult. Cheers. This guy has some scanning ideas.. check it out: TradeforGain.com

 

[henry766]

could you give us a little more detail on your excel scanning ? couldn't find much about excel on the site you suggested , thanks

 

[Rhody Trader]

I think i'm version 9 , but i think most are similer ,on reports page of scan you can save list to a folder , and or right mouse click on the securities you wish to save ( probably after sorting using/ pressing on "column to sort into correct scanned order by results ), after right clicking on these they turn blue depending on how many you want , right click menu has save to file , or copy to file ( and stuff like add to favorites). Anyway once you have a file of securities you've scanned (results) then use downloader and "convert" to excel in new file which you should then be able to access from excel i believe . It's possible earlier than 9 doesn't use windows files ( been a while) which might be problematic , good luck with it

Thanks. I figured out how to do it. Once you have your results, to get them into Excel it's just a question of right clicking and doing a Copy, then pasting into a spreadsheet.

 

[henry766]

my pleasure , good luck

 

[tradinghumble]

Excel Scanning

Basically you can automate the import of both fundamental and price data into excel and then start doing your queries... as I pointed out to you, look at this page

TradeforGain.com » Blog Archive » Solidifying my trading methodology and tools
TradeforGain.com » Blog Archive » Developing a NewTrading Plan, Part 2 - Stocks Selection (Technical)

he's built everything in Excel... the whole scoring tool, very use to do the same for trading signals based on popular indicators...

 

[Rhody Trader]

Excel can definitely do a great deal of cool stuff if you've got decent programming skills in VBA - and aren't dealing with a massive data set.

 

[tradinghumble]

I personally use a XLS that massages over 100,000 records... no problem, it all depends on how you write your code and ram... the speed at which you get things prototyped can't be beat... imo.

 

[henry766]

xls

Thanks , is xls excel language ( i'm just starting with excel), all the best

 

[Rhody Trader]

The macro language used by Excel (and other MS Office applications) is called VBA - Visual Basic for Applications. Basically it's Visual Basic with predefined objects. If you are thinking about using Excel to test trading systems, manipulate data, etc. then you definitely need to learn VBA.

 

[henry766]

thanks for that