Start seeing the other half of your investments
A stock screener is absolutely essential for the intelligent investor. It can help you find new stocks that weren't on your radar or never made it to the news, and give you signals for the best stocks to buy on any particular day. But what about knowing when to sell? The buy-side has all this great tooling for making decisions, but you haven't made (or lost) a dime until you actually decide to sell. So, how can we use a stock screener to complete the picture?
An instructive example
There are many stock screeners available but the Genovest Stock Screener has one that is particularly helpful in accomplishing this task. Other stock screeners might have this feature too, but we haven't found any, so I'll demonstrate this process using Genovest.
Let's say that you have purchased Ford Motor Co (F), General Motors Co (GM), and Honda Motor Co (HMC), and you want to sell each when their price-to-earnings ratio goes above 12. We're going to open the Screener, then set the universe to be only these stocks, and plug pe(1) > 12 into the filter rules.
You can find the universe menu in the upper right hand corner of the tool.
Click on "universe: all" to open the menu, then enter each ticker symbol, pressing enter or clicking the "→" after each ticker.
Now when we run the screen only Ford, General Motors, and Honda will be analyzed with the screener's rules. If any of these stocks meet the filter rule it will show up in the results and this will be your sell signal.
One of the unique features about the Genovest Screener is that you can use nearly any fundamental parameter and even a few technical criteria for your sell signals. You can set these individually or in combination, and even combine them with mathematical operators to create almost any sell signal you can imagine.
Making diligence easier
We walked through a simple example in this post, but hopefully you can see how this is a useful practice to help you adhere to a trading strategy. Instead of watching each stock individually and checking each criteria, simply look for results in the screen!
Be diligent, work efficiently, and invest with discipline. Let powerful tools like Genovest do the work for you so you don't miss the right time to take profits, or cut your losses short.