CNBC Stock Screener

Now that CNBC has opened up their brand new website, the first thing I did was to look to see if they had any new stock screeners. It appears they do and while I'm disappointed in the fact that they have very few pre-defined screens, I like the fact that 1) the screener allows you to export the results to Excel and, 2) CNBC's stock screener does a relatively good job of enabling the user to play around with the pre-built criteria and quickly see the number of matches when you customize the screen.

With basic screens like this, I like to strengthen the criteria so that the results identify 20 or fewer stocks. If you've never played around with a stock screen before, this is a great way to get started. The key is to then track the results over various time periods and different kinds of markets to judge how useful screens like this can be. I would also really like to see stock screeners like this do more sophisticated performance tracking. For example, just adding the ability to see how long a particular stock has fit the screen's criteria is quite useful (the longer the stock appears in the same screen the better) as well as information on position turnover (the lower the better).