Research Workbench · Stocks
Watchlist Stock Screener
Filter the companies you are already researching.
Apply margin, growth, leverage, dilution, and valuation criteria to a watchlist you supply. Every metric has a documented definition, missing data is reported instead of assumed, and results are pass or fail descriptions, never recommendations.
Direct Answer
The Watchlist Stock Screener filters companies whose metrics you supply, applying margin, growth, leverage, dilution, and valuation criteria to a watchlist you paste in rather than querying a live market-wide database. Every metric has a documented definition, and a company missing a figure a criterion needs is labeled "insufficient data" with the missing fields listed, never treated as zero. Results are pass or fail descriptions of thresholds you chose, not rankings or recommendations, and all processing runs locally in your browser.
What This Screener Does
This is a watchlist screener: it filters companies whose metrics you supply, rather than querying a live market-wide database. You paste or type the numbers from your own research (annual reports, SEC filings, or your broker's fundamentals pages), choose criteria or a preset, and the screener tells you which companies meet every condition, which fail, and which lack the data to be judged.
That last category matters. Screeners that quietly treat a missing number as zero produce confident-looking results built on absent data. Here a company missing a metric a criterion needs is labeled "insufficient data" with the missing fields listed, so a gap in your research stays visible. The full calculation definition for every metric lives on the research methodology page.
All processing runs locally in your browser. Company names and metric values are never sent to analytics or any external service. For choosing which filters serve which strategy, see how to build a stock screen and fundamental stock screening.
Screen Your Watchlist
Screening results describe which user-supplied numbers meet which user-chosen thresholds. They are not investment advice, not a ranking, and not a statement about future performance. Data quality is your responsibility: verify figures against primary sources.
Results
| Company | Ticker | Result | Detail |
|---|
The Seven Preset Screens
Each preset combines two or three criteria around one research question. Thresholds are deliberately round numbers meant to be adjusted, and passing a preset is a reason to research further, not a conclusion.
- Consistent Cash Generators: free-cash-flow margin at least 10%, operating margin at least 12%, interest coverage at least 6x.
- Improving Margins: operating margin up at least 1 percentage point year over year on a gross margin of at least 30%.
- Low-Leverage Compounders: net debt to EBITDA at most 1x, ROIC at least 12%, revenue growth at least 5%.
- Profitable Growth Candidates: revenue and EPS growth at least 10% each with a net margin of at least 8%.
- Cash-Rich Balance Sheets: net debt at or below zero (more cash than debt) and interest coverage at least 10x.
- Shareholder-Dilution Watch: share count up 2% or more in a year. This flags dilution to investigate; it is not a quality judgment.
- Valuation Compression Watch: price-to-earnings at most 18x while EPS still grew at least 8%. A starting point for asking why the multiple is low.
Metric Definitions
Every metric this screener accepts, with the calculation each value is expected to represent. Worked formulas and examples are on the research methodology page.
| Metric (column id) | Unit | Definition |
|---|---|---|
Market Cap (marketCap) | $B | Share price multiplied by shares outstanding. |
Avg Daily Dollar Volume (avgDollarVolume) | $M | Average daily shares traded multiplied by average price. |
Revenue Growth (revenueGrowth) | % | Latest fiscal year revenue over prior year, minus 1. |
EPS Growth (epsGrowth) | % | Latest fiscal year diluted EPS over prior year, minus 1. Not meaningful when either year is negative. |
Gross Margin (grossMargin) | % | Gross profit divided by revenue. |
Operating Margin (operatingMargin) | % | Operating income divided by revenue. |
Operating Margin Change (operatingMarginChange) | pp | Latest operating margin minus prior year operating margin, in percentage points. |
Net Margin (netMargin) | % | Net income divided by revenue. |
Free Cash Flow Margin (fcfMargin) | % | Operating cash flow minus capital expenditures, divided by revenue. |
Return on Equity (roe) | % | Net income divided by average shareholders' equity. |
Return on Invested Capital (roic) | % | Net operating profit after tax divided by invested capital. |
Net Debt / EBITDA (netDebtToEbitda) | x | Total debt minus cash, divided by EBITDA. Negative means net cash. |
Interest Coverage (interestCoverage) | x | Operating income divided by interest expense. |
Share Count Change (shareCountChange) | % | Latest diluted share count over prior year, minus 1. Positive means dilution. |
Price / Earnings (peRatio) | x | Share price divided by trailing twelve-month diluted EPS. |
EV / EBITDA (evToEbitda) | x | Enterprise value divided by trailing twelve-month EBITDA. |
Dividend Payout Ratio (dividendPayoutRatio) | % | Dividends paid divided by net income. |
Where This Fits in the Research Loop
Screening is a discovery step: it narrows a watchlist to the companies worth deeper work, following the Define and Measure steps of the Swoopr Research Loop. Companies that pass a screen move on to side-by-side comparison in the company fundamentals comparison tool and a full written study in the Research Workbench.
This page is the stock screener. Two sibling screeners run the same engine over different field sets, because the numbers that describe a fund or a property trust are not the ones that describe an operating company: the Watchlist ETF Screener uses expense ratio, published median bid-ask spread, tracking difference and concentration, and the Watchlist REIT Screener uses FFO and AFFO payout coverage, occupancy and net debt to EBITDAre. To weigh one asset class against another before screening within it, start at Compare Investments.
Frequently Asked Questions
What format does the input expect?
Rows with a header line naming the fields, then one line per company, using either the field identifiers or the labels shown in the definitions table. A name is required; a ticker is optional. Any field can be omitted entirely if it is not being screened on. The important convention is that a blank cell means the figure has not been researched, which is treated differently from a figure that has been researched and found to be zero.
What does an insufficient data result mean?
That the company is missing at least one figure a selected criterion needs, so the screener cannot say whether it passes or fails and declines to guess. The result lists which fields are missing, which turns the outcome into a research task rather than a dead end. This is deliberate: silently dropping such companies would make a screen look cleaner than it is, and treating them as failures would discard candidates for a reason unrelated to their quality.
Can a blank cell be entered as zero instead?
It changes the answer, so no. Zero is a real value that will pass or fail a threshold on its merits, while a blank records that the figure has not been established. A company entered with zero free cash flow margin because the number was not looked up will fail a cash-generation screen for the wrong reason and be excluded without anyone noticing. Leaving the cell blank surfaces the gap instead.
How should a preset threshold be adjusted?
The presets use deliberately round numbers so they are easy to move, and moving them is expected rather than exceptional. Thresholds that make sense for a mature, capital-light business are wrong for a capital-intensive one, and margin levels differ enormously across industries. Running the same screen at two or three threshold levels shows how sensitive the resulting list is to the cutoff, which is usually more informative than the list produced by any single setting.
Does passing more presets make a company better?
No, and treating the count as a score is the main way a screen gets misused. The presets overlap, so several of them can rest on the same underlying characteristic, and passing four screens built on cash generation says one thing four times. A screen narrows a list to candidates worth reading properly. What separates them after that is the research, not the tally.
What period should the entered figures cover?
One consistent period across every company in the list, most often the most recent full fiscal year or the trailing twelve months. Mixing a trailing twelve-month figure for one company with a prior fiscal year for another produces a comparison across different economic conditions. Fiscal year ends that differ between companies make this harder rather than optional, and noting the period each figure covers is part of the record the screen rests on.
Why does average daily dollar volume appear among the criteria?
Because a company that satisfies every fundamental threshold can still be impractical to hold at a given size. Dollar volume is the simplest available proxy for how much can be bought or sold without moving the price, and it is the constraint that most often eliminates otherwise interesting small companies. Including it in the screen surfaces that constraint at the discovery stage rather than at the point of trying to build a position.
Does the screener rank the companies that pass?
No. It reports which entries meet every selected condition, which is a pass or fail per company rather than an ordering. Ranking would require weighting the criteria against each other, and any weighting is a judgment that would be hidden inside the tool rather than made by the person using it. Companies that pass come out as an unordered short list, which is what the next stage of research is for.
How does this screener differ from the ETF and REIT screeners on this site?
The engine is the same and the fields are not. This one screens operating companies on fundamentals such as margins, cash flow, leverage and returns on capital. The fund screener works on the figures a fund publishes about itself, including expense ratio, spread and tracking difference. The property trust screener works on funds from operations, occupancy and property-level leverage. Using the wrong one means screening on metrics that do not describe the asset.