How to Use a Stock Screener: A Step-by-Step Guide

By MarketInOut · October 29, 2026

A stock screener filters thousands of stocks down to the few that match your rules: price above its 200-day average, RSI below 40, a P/E under 15, or whatever your strategy needs. Done well, it replaces hours of chart flipping with a short list you can study properly. Done badly, it produces lists of illiquid penny stocks or ideas that never worked in the past. This guide walks through the steps that make the difference.

What a stock screener does

Every screen has the same three parts:

A universe: the stocks you start from, such as NYSE and Nasdaq stocks, the S&P 500, or the Toronto Stock Exchange.
Conditions: technical rules (moving averages, RSI, MACD, candlestick and chart patterns, new highs) and fundamental rules (P/E, ROE, dividend yield, earnings growth). A stock must pass all of them.
A sort order: how the matches are ranked, for example by relative strength or by volume.

The screener applies the conditions to every stock in the universe and returns the ones that pass. On MarketInOut, screens update throughout the trading session, and US and Canadian data are near real-time.

Step 1: Choose the market and filter out illiquid stocks

Start by deciding where to look. MarketInOut covers 40+ exchanges, including NYSE and Nasdaq, the TSX, the London Stock Exchange, Xetra and Euronext, Tokyo, Hong Kong and BSE in India, plus forex and crypto.

Then add a liquidity filter. Without one, a US screen is dominated by thinly traded stocks whose prices jump on a few trades. Our ready-made screens use a filter like this for US stocks:

exch(nyse,nasdaq) and type(stock) and price > 1 and advol(21) > 1

That keeps NYSE and Nasdaq stocks priced above $1 with more than $1 million of average daily trading value: about 3,900 stocks on October 29, 2026, out of a much larger list.

Step 2: Start from a ready-made screen

You rarely need to start from scratch. MarketInOut has 210 ready-made screens in 18 groups, from market movers and swing-trading setups to dividend, value and growth screens, chart patterns and Elliott Wave. Each runs on the US by default and has tabs for Canada, the UK, Europe, India, Asia and crypto where the screen applies. A few examples:

Use them as they are, or as a starting point you adjust to your own rules.

Step 3: Describe your idea in plain English

If you know what you want but not how to express it, the AI stock screener turns a plain-English description into screening logic. For example: “Nasdaq stocks above their 200-day moving average that pulled back to RSI below 40 on above-average volume.” It handles indicators, price action, chart patterns, fundamentals and multi-condition filters, with no formulas to write.

Step 4: Write exact rules with a formula

When you want full control, the formula screener lets you write the rules directly. A pullback in an uptrend, for example:

exch(nyse,nasdaq) and type(stock) and price > 1 and advol(21) > 1
and price > sma(200) and rsi(14) < 40

And a simple value screen:

exch(nyse,nasdaq) and type(stock) and price > 1 and advol(21) > 1
and pe < 15 and roe > 15

Formulas can combine timeframes (a weekly trend with a daily entry, for example), add a market regime filter, and rank results by any value. The same formulas work in the backtester, which matters for the next step.

Step 5: Check whether the idea worked in the past

A screen tells you which stocks match today. It doesn’t tell you whether buying them has paid off. Two tools answer that:

Historical screening shows what a screen returned on any past date. Add a date to the formula, for example hist(3/20/2020), to see what the pullback screen above found near the bottom of the 2020 crash.
The strategy backtester trades the screen’s entry and exit rules over 25+ years of data, with stops, commissions and a benchmark. Delisted stocks stay in the data, so results aren’t flattered by survivorship bias.

The results are often surprising. Our backtests found that buying stocks at 52-week highs beat the average only in Canada, and that the golden cross worked on TSX stocks but not in the US. Testing first saves you from trading rules that only sound good.

Step 6: Get alerts instead of rerunning screens

Once a screen is worth following, save it and set an alert. MarketInOut sends new matches by email, Telegram or SMS, usually within a few minutes, so you hear about a setup when it happens instead of when you next remember to check.

Common mistakes

No liquidity filter. The results fill up with stocks you can’t trade at a fair price.
Too many conditions. Each rule removes stocks. Ten strict conditions usually return nothing; start with three or four and add more only if the list is too long.
Treating a match as a buy signal. A screen narrows the list. Check the chart, the news and the earnings date before you act.
Ignoring data timing. US and Canadian data are near real-time, but most other exchanges have a 15-minute delay. Intraday setups on those markets need that in mind.
Fitting rules to the past. If a backtest only works with very specific settings, it probably won’t work going forward. Robust ideas work across markets and periods.

Try the AI stock screener Browse ready-made screens

Stock counts are as of October 29, 2026. Ready-made screens run in the free version, which shows the first page of results.