Screener

Also seen as: screen, stock screener

What is a screener made of?

A screener is a universe plus a list of filters, and nothing else. The universe decides which instruments are eligible at all — by asset type, country, exchange, index, sector, and asset subtype — and each filter is one testable condition on a metric. The Matches tab carries the live count of instruments passing every filter at once, and it updates as you add, edit, or remove filters.

What can you do with a screener?

Three things: read its matches, backtest it, or attach it to a strategy. Backtesting a screener measures how its picks would have performed over six holding horizons — 1, 2, 3, 6, 12, and 24 months — against a benchmark built from the same universe with no filters applied, so the comparison isolates what the filters contributed rather than what the market did. That same Backtest view is where Fin offers to improve your filters or suggest new ones. Attaching it to a strategy makes the strategy buy what the screener selects; see Attaching a screener to a strategy for the steps. Backtested figures describe the past only — see Is this financial advice?.

Defaults in Fincanva

• A screener may hold up to 10 filters, on every plan. The figure is the same whichever plan you are on, and no upgrade raises it — there is no higher figure to buy. It is still enforced where a strategy is concerned: a strategy carrying a copy of a screener with more than 10 filters reads outside the plan until you remove filters from that strategy's own copy, or detach it. Trimming the screener in your library does not clear it — attaching copies the filters into the strategy, and the two are independent from then on.
• A screener that already holds more than 10 keeps working, and says so. Until recently nothing checked how many filters a screener carried when you saved it, on any plan — and on one plan the limit itself was higher before it was levelled — so a screener saved then may still carry, say, 15 filters. It reads, returns matches and backtests. Opening it on its own screener page, where it is yours to edit, shows a note above its filters — "This screener holds 15 filters; the limit is now 10. It goes on running, and your changes to it save normally while it holds no more than the 15 filters it was saved with. You cannot go above that number. No plan raises this limit." (A screener in a public folder is not yours to save, so it carries no note.) You can rename it, change its universe, edit a filter you already have, and remove filters — all of that saves normally. What is measured is what it was SAVED with, not the figure of 10: an edit to this screener is refused only when it would leave it holding more filters than it already has. Add a sixteenth and the note changes to say the draft cannot be saved and how many rows to take out; that wording goes as soon as the editor is back to the 15 it was saved with. Bring the editor down to 10 or fewer and the note goes altogether, before you save anything — reload without saving and it is back, because what it reads is the screener as SAVED. And every save below your old number becomes the new one: save at 12, and 12 is what the next edit may carry. Nothing is deleted, and no plan is being withheld from you — there is no higher figure to buy.
• A new screener opens as "Untitled screener" over the widest universe, and Save stays disabled until you change something: "Add a filter or change the universe to enable Save."
• Filters combine with AND, so an instrument has to pass all of them to be a match.
• A screener's matches refresh daily as new market data arrives, so the same screener can return a different set from one day to the next with no edit from you.
• Public screeners are read-only. To change one you use Copy to Mine, which puts your own editable copy in your library.
• Editing filters makes a screener's last backtest stale rather than deleting it: the app keeps showing the previous run under "Out of date — filters changed since the last backtest. Showing the previous run."

Worked example

You want cheap, sizeable US stocks with strong returns on equity. You set the universe to US-listed stocks, then add three filters: P/E < 15, Market Cap > 2B, and ROE > 15. The Matches count falls with each one — from the whole universe, to a few thousand, to a few hundred, to 38. Those 38 instruments are the screener's matches: the set a backtest measures and an attached strategy buys. Loosen P/E < 15 to P/E < 20 and the count rises again, because one condition became easier to pass.