Google stock screener

Google Finance has launched a stock screener that allows the user to screen stocks based on several criteria including a number of balance sheet and profitability variables, several valuation metrics as well as variables related to stock price performance. This tool makes possible a variety of analyses that could earlier be done only by those with an expensive Bloomberg or Reuters terminal. However, the universe is limited to about four thousand stocks which is much less than you would get if you subscribe to one of the commercial services.

For example, one can list the stocks with a market capitalization of more than a billion dollars that have a negative beta. There are fifteen of them, but several are bond funds or ETFs.

It is also interesting to just list the tops stocks by market capitalization and observe that three of the top five stocks are from China and Brazil.

I wish they would also allow screening by industry and geography. The query string in the URL clearly shows that sector and exchange are potential search fields, but these do not appear to be enabled as of now.

Posted at 9:48 pm IST on Thu, 3 Apr 2008         permanent link

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