Start with market beating strategies
You don’t have to start from scratch every time, because Equities Lab gives you an ample set of predefined stock screeners. These screens though intricate, are easy to read and understand. They use fundamental and technical analysis to choose their stocks, yet are simple to modify to your specific criteria.
This screen shows off the ability to look into the past, and ensure that things are moving in the right direction. These have increasing income, increasing revenue, and increasing gross margins. They also manage to outperform the S&P 500 over the last few years, when backtested.
If you have ever done any programming, you will soon see and appreciate that this carefully crafted language is simple yet powerful. We prompt you with choices as you type, and have help on all of our fields, mitigating confusion as you achieve mastery. Our formulas have many of the basics included, allowing you to build bigger ideas with less work.
continue with powerful operators
We can compare, select and perform mathematical functions, but so can our competition. Our ranking, sorting, and counting operations are what set us apart from the others. Though they sound simple, these operations are the difference between, “Is the P/E below 10?” and “Is the P/E lower than 75% of the others in its industry?”. Our count operator allows you to require some, but not all, of a set of conditions to be true. Why would you do this? A stock that matches most, but notall, of your qualifications can still be highly profitable, particularly in cases where your ideal stock that matches everything, doesn’t exist.
You will want to check how quantities change over time. This allows you to ask questions like, “Is the P/E always low, or is it normally higher?” or, “Is the P/E low because earnings rose?” You will be able to test and select for rates of change of any accounting information across time. Advanced users will find built-in features to calculate standard deviations, skewness, variance, correlation, kurtosis, and even Monte Carlo search logic. This transforms technical analysis from, “Find stocks that went up,” to, “Find stocks that have less volatility than their peers, and went up smoothly over the last year, excluding the most recent month.”
Analyze your Results
If your screen returns 12 results, getting them in a list isn’t a problem. You can manually check to see if they concentrate on one industry, or if they are all small cap stocks. As your screen returns more and more items, however, a simple list is going to become problematic. What if you had 112 items or even 1,112 items? You’ll need analytics: bar charts, sortable scatter charts, tilt charts, and more to make sense of that magnitude of financial information all at once. Equities Lab gives you that.
You can also search to see if a specific stock is already in your basket, and sort your stocks by sector.
Screening In The Past
Seeing performance is all well and good, but the ability to “jump around” in time can be immensely helpful. For example, you can use Equities Lab to see what you would have seen right before the crash of 2008 and examine the recovery in March 2009, to see if you could have predicted it. You can jump to January of 2011, and see if you can figure out a strategy that makes money even during that difficult year. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Screen With Help
We know that there is a lot here. Equities Lab provides sample formulas that you can quickly draw upon and include in your screener, either by name or by copying and pasting directly. If you get stuck, we can help at support@equitieslab.com. This is serious business: a career, a nest egg, a future. We know. That said, it is liberating (and downright fun) to be able to play with and explore the ideas that you have been limited to reading about up till now. Equities Lab gives you the power to do it all!