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Stock screening software is a highly efficient tool anybody can use to get the best trading and investing opportunities. This informative article discusses things to look out for and some ideas to maximize the utility of one’s trading dollar.

To begin with, you need the correct tool.  The stock screening software package you pick should have some key features.  It must be user friendly.  It should have a large collection of technical indicators and screens, including swing trading indicators, statistics and distribution measures, lookback computations, and longer term trend and oscillator indicators.  It ought to have at least 20 technical indicators, and more are always preferable.

Moreover, the stock screening software must permit you to combine price and volume rules with technical indicator filters.  Here’s an illustration:  suppose you want to find stocks in the middle of a longer term downtrend, but that have spiked up on high volume on a daily basis in the last week.  These could possibly be good shorting opportunities, since the high volume spikes could indicate short covering, rather than longer term buying or reversal of trend. You could combine a trend screen such as a 10 plus 30 period double moving average combination with a price pattern saying the close should be above the last 4 closing prices, and daily volume at least 2x the average turnover of the last 10 periods.  This will likely reduce the universe of stocks by 85% or more, allowing you to begin analyzing market news.

Regarding charts, your stock screening software must have these, and you must be able to open a chart instantly from the stock screen results without having to type in a ticker,capture more data, or other gyration.  The reason is because a good stock screen will isolate a big group of stocks, maybe 25 to 30 stocks, that might be potential opportunities.  However, unless you visually review them, make decisions about stops and targets, riskiness, overall trend, momentum, etc. you won’t know which ones are really good and which ones are trading traps.  To do that quickly you need to be able to click the stock ticker or another thing that immediately opens up a chart for fast visual analysis.

In addition, the capability to access multiple stock exchanges could be tremendously attractive in case the domestic exchange isn’t producing enough opportunities.  If you trade in a multi-currency account for example Barclays you can trade nearly 24 hours a day, 6 days per week.  This is a massive advantage, something your stock screening software should permit you to do by accessing various international markets.