There are more than 5,000 listed companies in India. Reading every balance sheet is impossible — which is exactly why a stock screener exists. It's a filter that scans the whole market in seconds and hands you a shortlist that meets your conditions. Here's how to use one. This is for learning only.
What a screener does
You set rules — "profit growing more than 15%", "debt-to-equity below 1", "return on equity above 15%" — and the screener returns only the stocks that pass all of them. It doesn't tell you what to buy; it tells you what's worth looking at, turning thousands of names into a dozen.
The filters that actually matter
- Size and liquidity. Market cap above a floor, and healthy daily volume, so you can enter and exit without moving the price.
- Profitability. Consistent profit, and a decent return on equity.
- Debt. Low or manageable borrowing — high debt is where many "cheap" stocks blow up.
- Growth. Sales and profit trending up over several years, not one lucky quarter.
- Valuation. A sensible P/E relative to growth and peers.
- Trend. Price in an uptrend, the idea behind momentum investing.
Free tools to start
Several good screeners are free: the NSE and BSE websites, and popular independent tools like Screener.in, Tickertape and Trendlyne, let you build and save custom filters without paying anything.
Where screening ends
A screen is the start of research, not the decision. A stock passing your filters still needs you to read what the business does, check the risks, and decide position size. The screen's job is only to make the haystack small enough to search.
A rule-based model portfolio is essentially a disciplined screener run automatically, every day, with entries and exits fixed in advance — see how in quantitative backtesting and our Model Portfolio.
How to find good stocks to buy today: a rule-based checklist
Skip the daily tips. A calm, rule-based checklist for deciding which shares to buy today — trend, strength, liquidity and risk, step by step.
The cost of timing the market: miss a few big days and your returns collapse
Jumping in and out to dodge falls sounds smart. The maths says otherwise — missing just a handful of the market's best days can wreck a decade of returns.
Asset allocation: splitting money across stocks, gold and debt
The single biggest decision in investing isn't which stock — it's how you split your money. A simple guide to asset allocation.
Comments
Loading…