A stock screener filters thousands of tickers down to a handful that match your criteria. This is a plain-language introduction to what screeners do, why they exist, and how to run your first search.
There are roughly 5,000 tradeable US stocks once you filter out illiquid penny names. No trader can look at all of them individually every day. A stock screener solves that problem: it's a search tool that filters the entire market down to the handful of names that meet the criteria you set.
Think of a screener as a database query running against every stock's daily data. You define conditions — "price above $10," "average volume above 500,000 shares," "up more than 4% today" — and the screener returns only the tickers that satisfy every condition simultaneously. Add more filters and the list narrows; remove filters and it widens.
Most screeners let you combine several of these at once, which is where the real power comes from — a stock trading above $3 with volume over 100,000 shares AND up more than 4% today is a very different (and much shorter) list than any one filter alone.
The screener itself is just a search engine — the value comes from the criteria you build into it. A well-designed universe filter (like the $3-price / 100k-volume rule used throughout WideRadar) removes noise from illiquid or unreliable names before any other analysis happens, so the results you see are actually tradeable.
A reasonable starting screen for new traders: price above $5, average daily volume above 300,000 shares, and trading above its 50-day moving average. That alone eliminates the vast majority of speculative junk and leaves a list worth studying further. From there, layer in relative strength or a specific setup you're looking for.
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