Wednesday, April 2, 2008 at 7:16 AM
I'm very happy to announce that today we are introducing a new stock screener to Google Finance. If you haven't used one before, a screener is an advanced search tool that lets you find companies which match a set of criteria. For example, you could search for large companies with a PE ratio less than 20 which pay at least a 5% dividend. Or you could screen for small tech companies with strong 5 year growth. It's entirely up to your investment strategy.
There are a number of new and cool features I'd like to mention. Anytime you make adjustments like setting a value, removing a criteria, or limiting the search to a single exchange, the list of results updates automatically. The search is completely live -- no buttons to press. We also have blue and white histograms so you can see the distribution of all companies for a particular value--for example there are far more companies with a market cap below one billion dollars than above. You can either grab the sliders or type exact values to the set the minimum and maximum for each criteria.
Once you have run a screen that you like, you can bookmark the page or email the link to a friend. Since not all of the criteria may be familiar terms, we've included definitions in the Add Criteria wizard, as well as a help icon next to each line.
As always, please let us know how you like it. We're hard at work on new features and want to incorporate your suggestions. Happy screening!
