Show HN: US Stock Screener | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: US Stock Screener

stockrow.com

173 pointsiShrimp93 comments

This is a very competitive field, with dozens of options. I have done extensive research myself in the past looking for screeners that provide enough functionality for my needs. I'm curious what problem you're attempting to solve vs. all the current entrants in this space? FWIW, I really like your UI + speed.

Things that I have had trouble finding executed well elsewhere (besides the super expensive tools like Factset, Bloomberg, etc) are: a) ability to program your own metrics or criteria w/ formulas and b) ability to leverage historical data beyond current and one previous fiscal year for very select data points.

By the way, I currently use Stock Rover, which has the most functionality I could find at a reasonable price. I do not like the interface but it works. Have tried many others.

That was a scratch your own itch project; just so you understand we (folks behind stockrow) are hobby investors who do not plan to pay for services like bloomberg and ycharts yet require tools and access to data in simplest possible form.

For us problem is that all screeners (and tools) that are available are either slow, dumb, lack flexibility, are really hard to use or expensive (or all of the above combined). So what we did with two friends of mine — we've created our dream product: simple and fast with all data freely available. It is still in it's infancy but we keep adding things that we need and improve it so it suits us.

Sorry to say but we do not plan custom metrics at this point as this is beyond our capabilities as investors at this points (frankly speaking we do not need them, but if voices are loud enough we might consider that options) but we do plan to introduce backtesting at some point.

I know about StockRover but for me UI is really complex; I need a screener where I can get results almost instantly without much thinking or clicking around.

Thanks for the reply. Agree w/ you on all counts for StockRover; I like your UI much better.

Thanks :-)

As a small time hobby investor, I basically gave up finding a stock screener that was affordable.

This looks great, I'd definitely pay a few dollars a month for something like this.

I've been looking for exactly this tool, looks and behaves really great Im looking forward to using it!

First off, neat tool! I see Finviz.com does much of the same for free.

> we (folks behind stockrow) are hobby investors who do not plan to pay for services like bloomberg and ycharts yet require tools and access to data

Respectfully, you do not require tools and data. You need to play a winners game and not pick stocks. Key to winning investing is to lower fees and taxes. Why?

> Contrary to their oft articulated goal of outperforming the market averages, investment managers are not beating the market: The market is beating them.

via "The Loser's Game" by Charles D. Ellis, written in 1995. www.cfapubs.org/doi/pdf/10.2469/faj.v51.n1.1865

A related podcast with the legend Charlie Ellis (via Masters in Business radio podcast). Mr. Ellis is a former chairman of the Yale University Investments Office and CFA Institute and one-time director of Vanguard Group. He also is the author of "Winning the Loser’s Game: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing."

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-17/charles-e...

For the record - I used to work at YCharts.

One of our loved features was the Screener - we modeled to make it as easy-to-use with setting your own custom metrics and really good timeseries information.

It's cheaper than FactSet and Bloomberg, and you can try a free trial from the site pretty easily.

I am a paying customer of YCharts and like it a lot generally, but the screener is actually lacking IMO. It does not have any historical data beyond TTM, though you are correct that you can create formulaic metrics. One of the things I like to screen for is growing revenue over multiple years, not just TTM; with screener from the OP here, YCharts and many others, that's not an option.

As someone who is completely ignorant about this field of work, can someone briefly explain to me what the difference between something like stockrow.com and google finance is?

First impression looks nice but it really needs a human-readable URL structure. For example, you can't tell the difference between what these link to which will really limit how people share your site:

https://stockrow.com/screener/b237f532-3a17-4671-a00d-787c92...

https://stockrow.com/screener/cd4d02b5-a02a-4fbb-ac27-58483d...

Definition of stock screener: http://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/stockscreener.asp

It's probably obvious to anyone who does investing, but I had no idea what I was looking at.

Tangent:

There's a link at the bottom to Google Finance. If you click through, the charts required Flash. Google Chrome is blocking Flash.

I bet that's a source of strife for the Finance team over at Google...

If you open up a portfolio in Google Finance, you're greeted with this warning:

> Google Finance is under renovation. As a part of this process, the Portfolios feature won't be available after mid-November 2017. To keep a copy, download your portfolio.

I wish the android app would update, it's from 2011

Yeah I don't get it either why up to this point they did not fix it? For company of such size it will take almost nothing to get rid of flash there and replace it with JS

I've been using Finviz for easily 5 years and loved the simplicity of it, but stockrow brought it to the next level.

I don't know of any other tool that offers P/E, P/S and P/B Ratios that can be embedded right over a candlestick price chart. That loads in < 2 seconds! It's a gamechanger for me. Thanks so much for building this.

Thanks :-)

It's nice, to the point and I really like the use of the monospaced font to make reading easier, especially any of the numbers.

Any plans to allow making user accounts? I would like to keep some stocks tracked and I am looking for a new tool.

Thanks for kind workd! And yup what you are asking for is next major feature on the list; watchlists and portfolio tracking.

Is there anyway we can signup to be notified when these features come available? This is fantastic btw.

Sorry now at the moment; watch Show HN for now ;-)

How about quickly setting up a email newsletter account to notify signups when you push out new features?

Nice project! Good timing too - I track my portfolio on google finance and they are turning that off in November.

It would be cool to pick a few stocks and generate the filtering criteria that's common amongst them.

Is there such a platform available for Australia as well which is free/not too expensive?

I'd be interested in this for the ASX as well. I've just been using the basic tools that come with E-Trade (now ANZ Shares).

In particular, I'm most interested in dividend yields, and I would pay something to be able to backtest a dividend strategy that also took the RBA Reserve Bank Cash Rate as an input. (Probably a bad idea, but it's something I've been wanting to try out.)

We do plan to expand our database worldwide in the future, so stay tuned

What are people using for portfolio tracking? Google Finance is shutting down portfolios so I'm looking for an alternative.

We do plan to introduce watchlists and portfolios for user tracking in near future. No ETA's though as this is a hobby weekend project

I work at wallmine and we've just released a simple tool for importing Google Finance portfolios:

https://wallmine.com/google-finance-portfolio-alternative

Let me know your thoughts!

Looks good but I can find no information about the wallmine company. Are they stealth or something?

Feel free to email neurofog <at> gmail <dot> com

I use http://www.marketwatch.com/watchlist

Seeking Alpha, the free piece of the service. It ties my portfolio to constant official news and internal opinion articles with comments at the bottom, lets you follow some authors, has a web and an app version, and a few other things. It's just not very good at cost basis stuff, and it's a pain to enter that stuff in. It also doesn't persist the cost basis between my web and app account, strangely. It gets angry at adblocking but still lets you use the free version of the site.

Check out Personal Capital. Really clean interface. I have all my checking, saving, credit, loan, asset values, and investments in their site which gives a nice running tally of your total net worth.

I like finviz and SigFig.

Google Spreadsheet

This is great! The #1 feature of this that other stock screeners (ameritrade, etrade esp.) lack is performance! Like the minimalist interface as well.

Thank you

This is really promising. I have tested many free screeners and they are really bad from UX perspective.

Can I filter by Sector and other category variables? I'm only focusing on tech sector and would like to build filters for various subcategories. I couldn't do it on mobile.

You can filter by sector on bigger device (tablet or laptop/desktop) but not on mobile. We will think about what can be done there, no promises though!

Very nice, fast, well laid out. Real-time updating would be the next best feature to implement, but it works really well friend. Hidden Gems is great. Advanced Search also very nice. Thanks a lot for making/sharing this

Thanks! Thanks a lot! Would look into realtime updates but it will be viable for news only atm; we receive financial data from our providers ~5pm NY time — so financial data is not realtime but it is updated daily.

This is an excellent tool. Kudos for releasing it. The speed is the killer feature.

Please, oh please, don't include videos on the page in the future. Financial sites that include videos make the pages slow and difficult to get around.

Thanks! We will not do that as we believe in honest ads and despise sites like yahoo finance due to ads overload. We plan to introduce premium subscription in the future (what is free now will stay free forever tough). It will be cheap-ish (something around 5-10$ a month) and if it will be financially sufficient we will remove ads all-together.

This is a nice piece of work. I don't trade stocks, so I don't screen them and can't speak to the market niche aspects other commenters have addressed but I'm impressed anyway :).

Thank you! Really nice to see people impressed outside of investing, means a lot to us :-)

Looks really good and like something I'd use. BTW, one small typo I noticed and can't unnotice: "Availible operators" :-)

Fixed :-)

Curious too, what are you using to scrape and parse earnings and annual statements? (since many of the queries can only be found there)

Guys, I was thinking to do something like this, and you guys have already made it. Looks good. Will use and give you more updates !

lovely! Is there a way to bookmark some stocks so I don't have to search everytime for the ones I want to look at that day?

Hey! No, not yet but as I've mentioned before our next major feature on the list is portfolio management and watchlists.

bookmarked. Excited to see it, need somewhere to move my portfolio now that google finance is killing that feature.

Where do you get your data? How reliable is it?

Where do you get stock data in general? I've seen many people use the data but never obtain the data.

Generally third party apps will get data from market data providers like xignite etc. And where does xignite get the data? They pay for sessions to receive market data directly from all of the exchanges they care about. This data is not cheap from either source.

Not cheap — not necessary. There are data providers like tiingo, quandl, intrinio (just to name a few) that provide quite a lot of data for reasonable prices.

That's true, everything is relative and it also depends what scale of market data you require. I think it's quite cheap to get end of day stock prices but if you want real time market data it gets steep. The closer you get to actual real time the more expensive seems to be the trend.

There is https://www.alphavantage.co which is free now but we've stayed away from them since they were not replying to our enquiries and they do not have any ToS available.

Cheapest realtime stock prices I've seen were ~500$; don't remember where that was though.

We buy it from various data providers. There are some errors here and there (we fix what we can) but overall data is of high quality.

Quick note on the UI. When looking at a ticker, the news hugs the edge of the screen. Maybe a little padding there could help.

Ah will fix that tonight! Thanks a lot.

Pretty please add European stocks (UK and Germany). The US screeners are all pretty good. Europe side it's all garbage.

Will think about it ;-)

I like the overview page's pros/cons and the clean design. Nice tool, will try it out for a few weeks.

Thanks, for me thats the first page I check about every company to get really quick insight.

Great tool!

Nice pre-filtered screens on the front page. Any plans to make those interactive so you can filter within them?

What are you using for a charting engine? I really like the time period selector

We are using highstock from highcarts

thinkorswim platform screener is king imo. you can create custom formulas for screening using almost any study (custom or preset). Also can be used for options / spread screening.

Ameritrade account is required though.

Cool interface. Well done.

Where are you guys getting your data from? How fresh is your data?

Thanks! We buy it from various data providers. News are almost realtime and financial data is updated daily starting 5pm (NYT time).

I use tiingo.com which is also great (no affinity, just a happy user)

I like your project. Great work. I created a bookmark.

Thank you!

beautifully done. I particularly like the reports on single stocks --- e.g. Overview screen and income/cf/balance sheets

Thanks!

this is rad! any way to screen for >1 year since IPO and within 5% of the peak?

Thanks! Not possible with IPO for now but the other thing you are looking for is 52 High Change — https://stockrow.com/screener/3ea3c22a-c913-4512-8f84-c47453...

Awesome, the UI is really straightforward, you did a great job!

I usually look for companies up to a year past their lock out date that have some momentum as my goto investments. sadly yahoo finance has closed their api, and i haven't found a decent replacement yet.

this is nice, really like the chart. But the stock price does not seem accurate.

Any specific examples? Apart from small errors here and there data should be accurate.

How do you get the data?

We buy it from various data vendors

curious... whats this built on top?

Ruby on rails and postgres if thats what you mean

Sweet!

It's really good. Flexible query expression chaining.

It would be nice to have "or" expressions for merging two expressions.

Also, an option for all results without pagination seems useful.

Finally, JSON and CSV export would be cool too.

(Feedback also sent within the app.)

We already have OR but it is still a bit buggy and needs some fixing around (thats why we do not publicly advertise it) — https://stockrow.com/screener/2ca1a6ad-3855-4baa-ae2e-710bfb...

As for the rest — we are slowly tackling these and will add them along the way no ETAs though since we it's a hobby project

A new stock screener? If there wasn't a better example that the stock market is about to pull back... I remember working on a stock screener in 2006...

source code?

Sorry it is not open sourced and we do not plan to disclose our source code in near future.

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