Best Stock Screeners for Swing Traders [2024]

Every successful trader has a winning system.

Every winning system has stock screeners.

We narrowed down hundreds of tools to the 5 best screeners we use daily.

Connor Kimball
Head of Operations

Table of Contents

Succesful Traders Have a Stock Screening System

Just 86 stocks (4%) accounted for HALF OF ALL STOCK MARKET GAINS in the last 90 years. 99.9% of all stock market growth can be attributed to the top 1,000 stocks.

The remaining 96% of stocks collectively matched one month of treasury bills.

What's the takeaway? If you don't have a system for screening the top 4% of stocks that account for all the growth, you're going to struggle as a trader.

Quantamental genius Trader Z explains in this short video:

Play Video

The Most Important Types of Screeners for Swing Traders

There are thousands of stock scanner options and it's easy to get bogged down. To start, keep the total number of scanners you use down to 3-5. We recommend the following:

CAN SLIM Screener: Bullish stock screen using a combination of fundamental and technical analysis techniques. It prioritizes stocks based on growth.

GARP Screener: Growth at a Reasonable Price (GARP) prioritizes stocks based on browth growth AND value.

Growth Stock Screener: Curated list of high-potential stocks based on growth criteria like price performance, relative strength, earnings, liquidity, and more.

Technical Stock Screener: An advanced stock screener that only looks for technical criteria you put in (like price action), ignoring fundamentals.

Stock Analysis Screener: An easy-to-use screen that includes some quantamental inputs, but focuses on expert analysis and human judgement to provide stock picks.

Best CAN SLIM Screener

Investors Business Daily (IBD)

Finds companies growing rapidly
Focused on earnings growth
Very effective in a bull market

Not very effective in a bear market.

Best GARP Screener

VectorVest

Favors companies with consistent earnings & growth, reasonable valuation, and strong profits.
Looks for consistency in price action, which CAN SLIM does not.
Finds cheap stocks that are rising in price.
Works better than CAN SLIM in bear markets.

Long-only strategy. Still struggles in a bear market.
It tends to favor small and mid cap companies with lower valuations. Often these companies are not in their actual growth phase.
It tends to favor sectors that are low volatility (in the past this would have been things like banks/insurance companies two sectors we don’t trade that often.
It will eliminate the most explosive growth stories and some of its most explosive stops.

Why We Use It

Growth at a Reasonable Price (GARP) is a well-known, much-practiced investment approach. It is a fundamental-driven investment strategy that balances pure growth and pure valuation, as the former tends to invest in high-growth, yet expensive stocks (That is CAN SLIM), while the latter may take a long-term investment to pay off.

Primarily, the GARP strategy favors investing in companies with consistent earnings and sales growth, reasonable valuation, and solid financial strength, combined with strong profitability.

VectorVest looks for consistency in price action. Something that never is taken into account in the CAN SLIM method. This would be Dutch’s “righteous trading” observation. If price consistently moving upwards and does not have large gaps and trading ranges then it is a righteous trading stock. VectorVest uses interest rates and multiples to determine a stocks “intrinsic value” something that CAN SLIM does not do at all.

VectorVest is looking for cheap stocks that are consistently rising in price. This is VERY different from CAN SLIM that does not factor in valuation or the consistency of a stocks trading price IN ANY FASHION.

Best Growth Stock Screener

MarketSmith Growth 250

MarketSmith simply tells you which stocks are working.
Always chooses stocks in hot sectors.
Doesn't care about valuation, growth, or company specifics.
Works better than CAN SLIM in bear markets.

MarketSmith ONLY tells you what is working.
Always chooses the hottest sector - which means it is late to the game sometimes.
Relative Strength is a great tool, but often leads to "chasing yesterday's winners."

Why We Use It

Best Price Action Screener

Market Club INO

Only analyzes price, so only tells you what is working.
Catches trend changes faster than RS models and long before the naked eye.
NO fundamental inputs, so doesn't show up "too late" to the party.
Works better than CAN SLIM in bear markets.

Market Club tends to bring up a lot of fundamental junk.
It doesn't factor sector or industry, which we know is critical.
It is indifferent to the market's overall trend and industry/sector trends

Why We Use It

Best All-Around Stock Screener

Seeking Alpha

Seeking Alpha is rigorously backtested and incorporates fundamentals.
It tends to find a lot of stocks that are mid to small cap where in general the market is less efficient.
It attempts to use professional analyst buy/sell recommendations in its approach

Seeking Alpha overemphasizes analyst contributions.
It tends to overemphasize valuation and buying “cheap stocks.”
It tends to overemphasize small and mid cap stocks.

Using Your Stock Screens Together

Great, you know the top 5 types of stock screeners you need and the specific scanners we use. Now what?

Now you use them together, and that's where the magic happens! Trader Z explains:

Extra Resources for Swing Traders

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