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 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filters makes a screener's last backtest stale rather than deleting it: the app keeps showing the previous run under "Out of date — filters changed since the last backtest.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.