FinViz Review – The Best Free Stock Screener?

About FinViz

FinViz is a free online stock screener and research tool, focusing on US stocks. It has become somewhat infamous in the trading community, as it seems just about every trader uses it from time to time. It offers a vast array of scanning functionality, from fundamental filters like EPS growth and insider ownership, technical filters like candlestick patterns and distance from moving averages, as well as descriptive filters like short interest and analyst consensus. FinViz boasts that their platform is used by a multitude of investment banks like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase, and hedge funds like SAC Capital.

Pricing Options

FinViz Elite is FinViz’ only paid subscription, costing $39.50 for a month-to-month subscription, and $299.99 for an annual subscription. Here is the features offered by FinViz Elite, pulled straight from their salespage.

Screener

The most coveted feature of FinViz is by far the screener. Offering vast functionality for free, most traders have a few screens they come to FinViz for. It has some features that most screeners don’t have. While it is not as powerful as a scanner like Trade Ideas or Equityfeed, it’s free, and it is incredibly powerful for a free tool There are three types of filters, Descriptive, Fundamental, and Technical.

Descriptive

Many of the features in this section are very run of the mill, here are the key features:

Earnings Date

FinViz allows you to be specific when scanning for a stock’s earning report. Whether you want to avoid stocks with upcoming earnings, or vice versa, there’s plenty of options. Like most of the features you’ll see here, FinViz Elite allows you customize this filter.

Target Price

This is the cumulative price target from various equity research reports.

IPO Date

Rare to see a screener let you scan for a specific IPO date.

Fundamental

There are just a couple key features from this section.

Insider Ownership

Not insanely rare, but FinViz as a platform caters to investors who use Insiders as part of their strategy, which is nice.

Insider Transactions

The sentiment of the insider transactions

Institutional Ownership

Another often neglected strategy in screeners is institutional sponsorship.

Institutional Transactions

The sentiment of institutional transactions

Technicals

Technicals is probably FinViz’ weakest area, most screeners have dozens of indicators at different values nowadays, however, they don’t have the unique filters offered in Fundamentals or Descriptive, which are harder to come by.

Pattern

A rare pattern in screeners, FinViz filters for candlestick patterns.

Candlestick

The most recent candlestick

Futures/Forex

This is another FinViz page that offers unique charts. While simple, a chart comparing performance of all futures contracts, including commodities, indexes, bonds, and currencies is pretty rare, and can be useful.

Insider Trading

“Insiders might sell their shares for any number of reasons, but they buy them for only one: they think the price will rise.” – Peter Lynch

Depending on your trading/investing strategy, this may be your most used page. It shows the most recent transactions by those the SEC considers “Insiders” of a stock, in other words, anyone on the board of directors, more than a 10% owner, or an employee of the company. The page is simple as needed. Many traders find turnaround momentum stocks using an insiders strategy.

Portfolio

This is pretty standard, however, the “Recalculate equally weighted $100K portfolio” is a nice feature.

Groups: Sector Analysis

An often overlooked feature on FinViz is their “Groups” tab, likely due to it’s ambiguous title. This page allows you to perform sector, industry, and capitalization (mega cap vs. small cap) analysis. One can get a quick macro view of what is moving the market on this page, which offers a bunch of great graphics.

News

FinViz’ news feed is very basic, and leaves much to be desired. It is a list of headlines, with no indication of curation. They pull links from standard sites like Bloomberg, MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal, etc. However, one interesting part about their feed is their blog feed. This section includes feeds from a lot of sites, including Motley Fool, TheStreet, Benzinga, Zero Hedge, Calculated Risk, and many more.

FinViz Market Map

This is an excellent feature that gives one a quick overview of global stock markets, and what stocks moved the markets. You can filter it to only view S&P 500 stocks, all US stocks, international stocks, or ETFs. You can look at the performance over one day, to a year, as well as look at relative volume.

Summary

While FinViz is most used for their screener, that likely wasn’t the intention from the get-go, as FinViz is short for “financial visualizations.” However, it seems like they’ve embraced their position as the go-to free stock screener on the internet. Used by top investment banks and hedge funds, down to the penny stock trader with $500 in his Robinhood account, we all thank FinViz for staying free for all of these years. FinViz remains one of the top free scanning tools, particularly for building watch lists. Serious traders who require real-time scanners may prefer a tool like EquityFeed.

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