If you ever wondered, how to effectively search through 1000’s of companies in seconds, here is the answer that you were looking for- Financial Times Equity Screener. This is, hands down, one of our favourite free tools. It lets you set any number of filters and quickly get a list of potentially interesting companies, that you can start exploring in details later.
Three main steps to get your results.
As you can see in the picture above, the whole idea is very simple. Chose your region, chose your sector and chose your filters. After that you can see the matches. A good place for trying out the screener capabilities is the list of predefined screens also available on FT.
What we personally like to do is to set the filters in such a way that we get a limited number of companies, passing it and then start looking further. Let’s say that you are interested in large companies, trading on London Stock Exchange that pay good dividends. First, select the region as UK and then chose your equity attributes to look something like this (you can put any values, that satisfy you):
Large companies paying high dividend
From here you can view the matches and dig deeper into the specific companies that look promising.
Many of the investment recipes found here, will require you to look for stocks with specific properties. This is one of the best free ways of doing it.
Have fun screening for the winners!