How to Use Finviz for Stock Screening: A Step-by-Step Guide

If you're going to do your own stock research, you need a screener. There are paid tools with all the bells and whistles, but for most individual investors, Finviz (finviz.com) gives you a remarkable amount of power for free. The screener alone can help you cut the universe of thousands of publicly traded companies down to a manageable watchlist in under ten minutes.

The catch? The interface can be overwhelming when you first open it. There are dozens of filters, and it's not immediately obvious which ones to use or how to combine them. This guide will walk you through everything — from the basics to building a complete value screen and a growth screen you can actually use.

What Is Finviz?

Finviz stands for "Financial Visualizations." It's a web-based platform that aggregates financial data, news, and charts for U.S.-listed stocks. The free version gives you access to the core screener with a slight data delay (typically 15–20 minutes). The paid tier (Finviz Elite) adds real-time data, backtesting, more chart types, and export functionality.

For the screening exercises in this guide, the free version works perfectly.

Getting to the Screener

Go to finviz.com and click Screener in the top navigation. You'll land on a page with three tab rows: Filters, Charts, and Tickers (plus News and Maps).

Stay on the Filters tab. This is where all the action happens.

The filters are organized into two rows:

• Descriptive — geography, exchange, sector, industry, market cap, and similar categorical filters
• Fundamental — valuation ratios, growth metrics, financial health indicators
• Technical — chart patterns, moving averages, relative strength, short interest

You can combine filters from all three sections. Let's go through the most useful ones.

Key Filters Explained

P/E Ratio (Price-to-Earnings)

Found under the Fundamental tab, the P/E ratio filter lets you set a range for the price-to-earnings multiple.

Common settings:

• "Under 15" — screens for deep value or cyclical companies
• "Under 20" — broader value screen, excludes high-growth premium names
• "Profitable only" — filters out companies with negative earnings (Finviz shows this as "Profitable (>0)")

One nuance: Finviz uses trailing twelve-month (TTM) P/E by default. A company with temporarily depressed earnings will show an inflated P/E even if forward earnings look better. Use this filter as a starting point, not an endpoint.

Forward P/E

This is the price divided by next year's consensus earnings estimate. It's often more useful than trailing P/E for evaluating whether a company is cheap relative to its expected earnings power. Look for it in the Fundamental tab.

EPS Growth (Earnings Per Share Growth)

Finviz offers several EPS growth filters:

• EPS growth this year — current fiscal year vs. prior
• EPS growth next year — forward-looking estimate
• EPS growth past 5 years — compound annual growth rate over five years
• EPS growth next 5 years — analyst consensus long-term estimate

For a growth screen, you'd typically set "EPS growth next 5 years" above a threshold (say, 10% or 15%). For a value screen, you might not filter on EPS growth at all — or you'd look for companies that had earnings growth in the past but are now trading cheaply.

Sales Growth (Revenue Growth)

Similar structure to EPS growth, but measuring top-line growth. A company growing revenue but not earnings may be investing for the future — or may have a margin problem. Use in conjunction with earnings growth filters.

Insider Ownership

Found in the Fundamental tab. This filter shows what percentage of shares outstanding is held by company insiders (executives, directors, major shareholders with 10%+ stakes).

Why it matters: high insider ownership aligns management incentives with shareholders. Founders who own a meaningful stake have real skin in the game.

Typical threshold settings:

• Over 5% — some meaningful insider presence
• Over 20% — significant insider ownership, often founder-led companies
• Over 30% — heavily insider-owned; management interests are closely aligned with shareholders

One caveat: very high insider ownership can also mean lower float and thinner liquidity, and it can reduce accountability to outside shareholders. Use this filter in context.

Short Float

The short float percentage shows what percentage of the free float (publicly available shares) is currently sold short. This is found under the Technical tab.

Why it matters:

• High short float (above 15–20%) indicates significant bearish sentiment from professional investors. Short sellers typically do extensive research; a heavily shorted stock deserves extra scrutiny.
• Low short float means most market participants aren't making an active bet against the company.

You can also use high short float as a contrarian signal — if a heavily shorted company beats expectations, a short squeeze can cause rapid price appreciation. But that's a high-risk strategy, not a core screening tool.

Country

In the Descriptive tab, you can filter by country to narrow results to U.S.-only companies, or to look at companies listed on U.S. exchanges but headquartered abroad (ADRs, foreign private issuers).

For most beginning investors, sticking to USA reduces complexity — U.S. companies file standardized SEC reports, are subject to consistent accounting standards, and have better analyst coverage.

Sector and Industry

Also in the Descriptive tab. You can screen within a single sector (Technology, Healthcare, Financial, Consumer Discretionary, etc.) or a specific industry (Semiconductors, REITs, Banks, etc.).

This is useful when:

• You have domain expertise in a particular area and want to fish in familiar waters
• You want to avoid sectors you don't understand
• You're building a thematic screen (e.g., dividend payers in the Utilities sector)

Market Cap

Filter by market capitalization — Large Cap (typically $10B+), Mid Cap ($2–10B), Small Cap ($300M–$2B), or Micro Cap (under $300M).

Small caps tend to be less efficiently priced (less analyst coverage, less institutional ownership), which theoretically creates more opportunities for attentive investors. They also carry more liquidity risk and business risk. Your preference depends on your experience level and risk tolerance.

Building a Value Screen

Here's a simple but effective value screen using Finviz. The goal is to find financially sound companies trading at reasonable valuations with some insider skin in the game.

Filters to set:

| Filter | Setting | |--------|---------| | Country | USA | | P/E | Under 15 | | Forward P/E | Under 15 | | Price/Book | Under 2 | | Debt/Equity | Under 0.5 | | Current Ratio | Over 1.5 | | Insider Ownership | Over 10% | | Market Cap | Mid ($2–10B) or Large ($10B+) | | Avg Volume | Over 200K (liquidity filter) |

When you apply these filters, you'll typically get a list of 20–60 companies, depending on market conditions. That's a manageable starting list for deeper research.

The next step — and this is critical — is reading the actual 10-K and 10-Q filings for any company that clears the screen. A filter can't tell you about business quality, competitive moat, or management character. Those require reading.

Building a Growth Screen

The growth screen targets companies with above-average earnings and revenue growth, while still requiring some valuation discipline.

Filters to set:

| Filter | Setting | |--------|---------| | Country | USA | | EPS growth next 5 years | Over 15% | | EPS growth past 5 years | Over 10% | | Sales growth past 5 years | Over 10% | | Return on Equity | Over 15% | | Gross Margin | Over 40% | | Debt/Equity | Under 1 | | PEG Ratio | Under 2 | | Market Cap | Mid or Large | | Avg Volume | Over 500K |

The PEG ratio (P/E divided by EPS growth rate) is particularly useful for growth screens. It normalizes the P/E ratio by growth expectations. A PEG under 1 is often considered attractive; under 2 is reasonable for high-quality growth companies.

High gross margins (above 40–50%) are a quality indicator — they typically reflect pricing power and scalable business models.

This screen will surface companies growing quickly with strong returns on capital and reasonable valuations relative to their growth rates.

Pro Tips for Using Finviz Effectively

Save your screens. Finviz allows free users to bookmark URLs that encode the filter settings. Just copy the URL after applying filters — it'll have all your parameters in it. Paste it into a note for future use.

Run multiple screens. The output of any screen is just a starting list. Run your value screen. Run your growth screen. Look for names that appear across both (rare, but they exist). Cross-reference with recent news and earnings.

Don't over-filter. Adding too many filters can leave you with zero results or a tiny sample with survivorship bias. Start broad, then tighten incrementally.

Use the charts tab. After generating a list, switch to the Charts tab to see thumbnail charts of every company in your results. You can quickly scan for technical patterns, relative strength, and obvious disasters (like a stock that's down 70% for a reason).

Check the news tab. Finviz aggregates recent news headlines for each ticker. A quick scan of news for your screened companies can surface corporate events (earnings beats/misses, insider sales, lawsuits, leadership changes) that the quantitative filters can't capture.

Look at insider transactions. From any individual stock's Finviz page, you can see a table of recent insider transactions. Clusters of insider buying are a meaningful signal; heavy insider selling warrants investigation.

From Screener to Watchlist

The screener is a filter, not a verdict. The goal isn't to buy everything that appears on a Finviz screen — it's to build a watchlist of companies worth investigating further.

A good workflow:

1. Run your screen → get 20–60 names
2. Spend 5 minutes on each — read the company description, scan the 10-K
3. Cut to a shortlist of 10–15 companies worth deeper research
4. Do full fundamental analysis on the shortlist before deciding

The Finviz screener gets you to the right neighborhood. Your own research tells you which house to buy.

Find More Research Tools at valueofstock.com

Finviz is one tool in the arsenal. At valueofstock.com, we break down more research methods, valuation frameworks, and screener strategies to help you find ideas and analyze them intelligently. Whether you're just getting started with stock research or refining a more advanced process, there's always more to learn.

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The information in this article is for educational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Always do your own research before making investment decisions.