Best stock screening products

Free: ADVFN

If you've got some time on your hands, there is actually a very powerful screening tool available at www.advfn.co.uk. If you look for a particular share through their quotes menu, you can then analyse the fundamental data on the company. When you're there, look up at the top of the page and you'll see a tab called Advanced Search, which allows you to conduct a fairly detailed screen of the market. It takes a bit of getting used to, but it works a treat ! You can also access ADVFN's even more powerful screening system, called Filter X, through the fundamentals page for any share. One caveat though – I'm not convinced that all the source info is entirely accurate, so always cross check the data with other sources.

£120 per annum: InvestorEase

Step forward the simplest and the easiest to understand offline software package on the market - InvestorEase. This programme's great forte is that it's dead easy to use, very simply presented and is an absolutely wonderful way of keep tracking of the market on a daily basis. Its fundamental screens are also very simple and very useful – but they're not very powerful. The measures you can use to screen the market are basic and some key metrics like brokers' estimates of future EPS are missing. Still, for most investors, this package will be quite enough - the question is whether its simplicity and ease of use is justification enough for the price tag, when a lot of this functionality can be had for free elsewhere.

£140 per annum: Market Stars, from Digital Look.

The main DigitalLook site has a stock screening tool, but Market Stars is much more powerful - hence the £140 annual price tag. You can run screens on Market Stars in three different ways:

• Screening Wizard - a very basic screen that will probably be a little under-whelming for most readers.

• The key fields screener - basically a stripped down version of the main screen with 13 main fields. Again, its easy to use, but I don't think this will be of enormous interest to most readers.

• The full screener tool - a long list, on a long page that boasts nearly every measure you'll ever need. Once you understand the key measures used, this should keep you going for ages. One feature I particularly like is that as you enter a key measure and its value, you instantly see how many companies pass the screen.

MarketStars offers you a number of other benefits. One is the ability to back test a strategy – one you've developed, or a pre-existing one – although the timeframe is a bit limited at seven years. You access this feature by clicking the ‘Test Strategy’ button. Another is the email alerts. Once you've designed your screen and saved it, you can set up it to send you an alert every time a new company passes your test.

You can also print out PDF factsheets on companies thrown up by the screener, and overlay a huge variety of technical analysis indicators.

I think this is a great system that's well worth the money, but it's not perfect and I wouldn't rely exclusively on it. I'd always look to back up its results with those of a software-based screen.

£150 per annum, plus £80 membership: Sharescope

Sharescope is more expensive, more complicated and more powerful than Investorease. It's loaded with all sorts of tools and its stock screening system – under Data Mining – is awesomely powerful and has almost every measure you'll ever need. Sharescope also boasts another wonderful feature – you can download your shortlist to a separate Excel spreadsheet. If you run regular and high powered stock screens, Sharescope is invaluable.

£335 per annum: CompanyREFS

If you’re willing to commit a significantly larger amount of money you’ll end up with the wonderful CompanyREFS system – on a quarterly basis. You can choose to receive your REFS either in traditional printed form, or via CD, which is much more useful in my book. REFS is head and shoulders above the competition in the power of screening tools, and is actually the source for many of Sharescope's most powerful metrics. But I wonder how timely it is given the quarterly nature of its publication

£775 per annum: monthly REFS

This is a wonderful tool, especially if you opt to receive it on CD, but it's very expensive for all but the most experienced investors, or maybe wealthy share clubs.

See the table below for a summary of these products - and please note that the ratings given are my personal views, which may not necessarily be those of the Investors Chronicle. I'll run through the features of the IC stock screening tool next week.

Summary of key stock screening products