I recently received an email from one my newsletter subscribers asking me about the top free Canadian Stock Screeners. This is why I decided to do a little bit more research on the topic and also added my comments to each of them instead of simply making a quick list of free stock screeners.
Stock screening is crucial when looking for your next investment. However, when you are looking for free Canadian Stock Screeners, you don’t have many options… so here we go:
Top Free Canadian Stock Screeners
The TMX stock screener is very comprehensive and easy to use. The page starts with “basic” criteria such as sector, share price, earnings per share, market cap, etc. What I really like is that you can add more criteria to your search.
I went directly into the dividend section and I was able to search by dividend yield, dividend payout ratio and average dividend yield over the past 5 years. I would have liked to have dividend growth but you can’t have everything from a free Canadian stock screener!
Along with dividend metrics, several other common criteria are available. It’s easy to find them as they are all classified by type of criteria. Overall, it is a good screener to start your search.
Globe Investor stock screener is powered by The Globe & Mail, the biggest Canadian newspaper. They offer a few search options through their free version but the advanced (which is not free of course) application looks sharper. They actually offer a free trial so you might want to look into it. The “GlobeInvestor Gold” stock screener enables you to separate winners from loser stocks along with many other features.
Here again, not many resources for dividend metrics besides the dividend yield. It seems that the rest of the information is hard to find within the screeners!
This one is not exactly a stock screener as you don’t have to enter metrics for the search. However, it classifies stocks according to their own metrics, mostly related to technicals. So you get a group of the 52 week high, bullish 50/200 days, parabolic, new uptrend, etc.
You have bullish, bearish, candlestick patterns and P&F patterns group types. This could be interesting if you want to use some technical analysis but there is very little use for dividend investors…
How The Market Works Stock Screener
This is a smaller, but easy to use screener covering both American and Canadian stock markets. I like the fact that the screener publishes all possible stocks according to the search but that’s about it. The lack of any dividend metrics or should I say the lack of search metrics period makes this screener pretty useless. Searching Canadian stocks only based on a P/E ratio, volume and share price is not enough for a serious investor!
When I first landed on this page, 2 things crossed my mind:
#1 Whoa! This stock screener is ugly!
#2 Cool! There are a lot of parameters!
Unfortunately, after a few tries at playing around to find Canadian dividend stocks, I wasn’t able to get what I was looking for. If you are a dividend investor, you won’t like this stock screener as the only dividend metric you can enter is dividend in dollar amounts. Why would you prefer dividends in dollar over dividend in percentage?
On the other hand, it gives the possibility to make several searches on technical analysis metrics. The stock screener pulls out up to 10 stocks which is not impressive either. In all honesty, I just didn’t like it!
My first pick for a free Canadian stock screener
As you can see, there is not much choice for a free and reliable Canadian stock screener. By a lack of choice and not because I have fell in love with it, the TMX Stock Screeners seems to be the most complete and interesting stock screener for dividend investors. Since you are limited with the free offers on the market, you might want to dig a little bit further with your brokerage account to see which type of stock screener they offer! This could be another great option!
While all of these stock screeners offer Canadian stock searches, they also offer other markets (especially the US stock markets!). Don’t worry US readers, I didn’t forget you. Next week, I’ll do the same exercise for US stock screeners. In the meantime, If you are looking For additional info on stock research, you can download my free eBook; Dividend Investing, look into my top stock websites and take a look at my Canadian dividend stock lists.
So tell me, among all Canadian stock screeners, which one do you use most?
No FinViz? I love this screener, and if you select “Canada” it narrows it down to only domestic stocks.
http://finviz.com/screener.ashx?v=161&f=fa_div_pos,geo_canada
@Andrew,
I didn’t put FinViz because you only have Canadian stocks trading on a US exchange. which doesn’t give much options.
I’ll do a full review of FinViz next week in my US Stock Screener 😉
thx!
I actually use a combination — GlobeInvestor with Google Spreadsheets. I keep a large list of both Canadian and US stocks on Globe Investor, and then use their export functionality into a Google spreadsheet.
Then, with a preset series of lookups and calculations, I can have all the metrics I need/want. With filters on the spreadsheet, I can build even quite complex screens.
It’s a bit cumbersome, but quite powerful.
Nice post, I had a similar one planned, now I’ll just have to wait 🙂
I like the TMX one myself, pretty much everything I need and very easy to use.
Not ADVFN?
http://ca.advfn.com
filters include yield, payout, 3 to 5 Year growth rates, and long term debt to equity