Investor Tool Review: Screener.co – the new kid on the block

April 14th, 2011
Tags: Tool Review.

Last week I reviewed Sharelock Holmes, the UK’s best fundamental stock screener. This week I took a look at the newest addition to the crowded stock screener market, Screener.co, which exited beta on April 1st (so, unfortunately free access is no longer available).

Wide and Deep Coverage

Screener.co offers global coverage including 40,000+ stocks from 30,000+ companies, as well as the ability to screen on more than 1,000 data points per company. The number of data points is particularly important, as this is my biggest criticism of the other screeners that are available. One nice data point is the “country of operation”, which allows the user to screen out all of the Chinese reverse merger companies that currently fill value screens.

Highly Functional and Accurate

Screener.co has taken a page out of RobotDough’s playbook, allowing for “Plain-English, free-form conditions” which allow the user to build composite criteria and ranking formulas similar to RobotDough. I have found that RobotDough’s results are sometimes inaccurate, but from what I have seen of Screener.co, I have found only accuracy.

Screener.co also offers automated alerts, similar to what Zignals does (Zignals is currently the best for automated alerts, allowing specific stock alerts and screened results alerts) for changes to the screened results:

Fantastic Output

Unlike Sharelock Holmes, Screener.co has put a lot of effort into making the outputs aesthetically pleasing (see screenshot below). Also, Screener.co allows users to export the results to excel – such a simple feature but a wonder why the other companies fail to do this. It is the small touches like this that make me think Screener.co was built by actual investors rather than outsiders trying to take advantage of a perceived business opportunity.

Pricing

Unlike RobotDough, Zignals, Google Finance, etc, Screener.co has decided to charge for its services, and fairly high rates as well. Whether the user will find enough of a benefit from using Screener.co versus its (many) competitors, such that paying these fees, remains to be seen. I doubt it, especially since the additional features that Screener.co offers are easily replicated by its (free) competitors.

Conclusion

While I enjoyed testing this service and I am excited to see what the company does in the future to stay relevant as its competitors introduce some of these features, I don’t find enough value to justify the pricing right now. I think the only users who would get enough value to justify the pricing are those who have a portfolio composed largely of international stocks, as most screeners today lack strong international coverage (though, Zignals does a great job with this now, and it is free). Given all the new entrants to the market, I doubt this company will be able to charge these rates for very long.

Talk to Frank about Screener.co

Anonymous

Frank,

Thank you very much for taking the time to review our service. While we would like to offer our tool for free, the data licensing fees and structure for our institutional-caliber data essentially prohibit that.

The competitors are in the same boat. RobotDough is in Beta and will likely charge after the beta period and Zignals already does charge for their premium features.

We plan to stay a step ahead on accuracy, performance, and features but cannot give the tool away for free. At $24.95/month, it is the same price as just 3-4 trades a month, depending on your broker. Our goal from the outset was to make this caliber of tool accessible and we believe we can do it at that price point.

If there is anything else we can do to keep you as a user, please let me know.

Thanks again,
Lenny Grover
Founder/CEO
FinToolbox/Screener.co
http://www.facebook.com/shlomi.ardan Shlomi Ardan

Frank,
If you’re looking for an interesting UK stock, you might wanna have a look at Enterprise Inns.
It’s a pub company, trading at 4.5 times FCF. it’s selling at 1/17 the price it was 3 years ago, and it’s making a relatively stable profit.
ETI’s competitors are getting into trouble while ETI’s is keeping pretty healthy and well situated to come out stronger than it came in.

check it out,
long ETI

Shlomi Ardan
http://www.valueuncovered.com Adam

Frank,

I’ve been searching for a solid stock screener for years. Most limit the user with pre-defined criteria which almost never matched the advanced metrics that I like to look at. Stockscreen123 was the first one that I came across that allowed the building of user-generated screen metrics with complicated formulas, so I could finally screen for stocks using Enterprise Value, CROIC, or Net Working Capital.

I’ve spent some time over the past few weeks on Screener.co, and it is by far the most powerful that I’ve ever used, especially as it relates to international stocks (a huge drawing point, at least for me right now). The interface is a bit wonky and cumbersome, and there are some quirks I’d really like for them to clean up (saving over old screens, etc), but there is no doubt that it is powerful.

Long-term, who knows – as an investor, I’d love for all of them to be free!

Frankly Speaking

Investor Tool Review: Screener.co – the new kid on the block

First Time Visitors

Articles by Category

Articles by Date

Support This Site