Screeners – They are the simplest way to start a search for stocks. However, you need a starting point and that starting point should be some general criteria. Rule: Stocks follow the market. When the market goes down really dramatically, it takes all stocks with it. Often, it can take industry groups with it. An industry group is a collection of stocks that are in a certain industry. An industry group classification is good in that, for a given period of time, one industry group will outperform all others in terms of price increases. Also, there will be a leader in a particular industry group for price performance in a given period of time. Note that one of the most critical phrases in all of investment is “performance over a given period of time” or its equivalent. Note that there are as many industry groups as people who create them. I like to use MIGs – Morningstar Industry Groups. As an example, All major indexes – SPY, NDX & DJ-30 are down for the last 5 days but 55 of the 238 MIGs (2561 of 8269 stocks) are still in positive territory, giving a little hope to a downtrending market.

Screeners allow you too start a search for stocks you like based on criteria. You want stocks that perform well but what time period do you use? There is no one right answer for that question. The vast majority of today’s best performing 100 stocks for the past year did not exist in the year of my birth and are anything but household names. How do you find those babies?

You start with a screener and some criteria. I’m going to use Zack’s screener. During this lesson I’m going to keep track of some of the peculiarities of their screener, just to show what they are. You’ll need to understand them to help you with the screener.

• The market cap is in millions.
• Volume is given in hundreds. Screen for daily volume of at least 250K.