Thursday, April 28, 2011

Using Zignals Stock Screener to Search for UK Stocks

This is in response to a feedback we received from one of our U.K. members.

Hi I am looking to use your stock screener in a slightly different way that it seems to be set up for. For example I would like to find the top 30 shates in the FTSE by Market Cap. From that 30 I would like to select 10 with the highest Div Yeild and from that 10 I would like to select the 5 with the lowest price. Thuse always screening down to a list of 5 shares. Is there anyway this can be done without a trial and error method of entering values. Also when using the above even though I have specified shares in GBp shares in USD are also included eg VOD. Is there any way to only have GBp displayed. Thanks for your help. Robert

To emulate this set up in our Screener do the following:

[1] Because we are only interested in FTSE stocks, not FTSE stocks listed on other exchanges, we need to configure the screener to only show UK stocks. In Currency, only select for GBP British Pound and for Exchange only tick the box for LSE.


[2] Next we add Market Cap (without adjustment) from the Valuation menu.


This offers a list of 2,308 stocks. Next, go to the Results Pane and sort the Market Capitalization column from High to Low; to do this, click the column header twice.


This will order the results from Highest Market Cap on down. Next, in the Results pane again, select to view 40 stocks a page.


Because our Results also list preference shares we want to give the screen some scope beyond a hard set 30 stocks, plus we want to accommodate the extra share listings generated by the preference shares. So to get the Market Cap range we want to filter by go to the bottom of Page 2 of the Results (set at 40) and find the Market Cap value of that stock. In our case, the stock listed at the bottom of Page 2 is Morrison Supermarkets PLC and has a Market Cap if £7.67B


Going back to our Market Cap filter we now enter an opening range of "7.67B"


This leaves us with 81 Results (but fewer stocks because of the addition of Preference shares). A tighter scan could have used the Market Cap listed at the bottom of the page 1 of Results, i.e. £24.5B.

[3] Next we want to add the Dividend Yield filter. This is available from the Dividends filter menu


This time we want to set for the top 25 results from our reduced list of 80. As was done with the Market Capitaliation filter, we need to sort our Results by Dividend Yield from High to Low (click the column header twice), then sort the results by selecting for a Page size of 25. Scroll the Results of page 1 to the bottom and take the Dividend Yield of the 25th ranked stock and set it as the filter value.


So now our Results look something like this:


[4] Next we want to filter by Price, Low to High. As our final Filter we add the Current Price


This time we set the filter variable to look for the top 15 results. Click the Current Price column header in the Results pane just once to sort from Low to High. Then select to display only 15 results.  Scroll to the bottom the get the 15th value for Current Price, this becomes the filter value to use for Current Price. In this case it's £12.69 of GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). Note, the screener is sorting and displaying results for UK stocks in pounds, not pence.


Because we are looking for low priced stocks, the Current Price filter value is applied to the Maximum, not Minimum range box.

[5] Now our Screener looks like this:


This has left 15 results, with some duplication. For example, Aviva PLC is listed with three symbols in our 15 results.

By setting the Current Price filter maximum to £4.00 we reduce the number of stocks down to 4: Centrica (CNA), BAE Systems (BA.), Vodafone (VOD) and BT Group (BT.A); note, some lesser instruments of the parent stock will appear in the scan, e.g. "BT" for 'BT Group' and "AP16" for BAE Systems.

[6] Zignals offers a service no other free (or paid for) Screener does; the ability to turn a static screen into an active screen. When you activate your screen, new stock candidates are sent to you via email as they qualify under your screening criteria. The active screen also notifies you when current candidates fail to make the grade. At any time you can log in to Screener and get the full list of candidates.

To make your Screen active you first need to save the Screen. Do this from the [Save] menu


After you have saved your Screen you will notice the "Create Fundamental System" button will be available for selection.


Select it and give your Fundamental System a name


The Fundamental System will do two things

[1] It will create a Stocklist - which you can use in Alerts (create a price based alert on your Active Screen stocklist), Charts (select in Multiview - see your stocks in realtime), StrategyStudio (build a trading strategy using technical rules) and more. The created Stocklist will update daily with the stocks qualifying under the filter conditions.
[2] Set up delivery of an email containing changes to this list. This is sent after the market closes.

If you go to the [Open] menu of Screener you will see the saved Screen; clicking the red [X] will stop the active screen and delivery of emails. Clicking the trash can icon will delete the saved Screen.


You can find out more about the Zignals Screener in this Help Video here:



And creating an Alert based on an Active Screen here:



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