Screening by Relative Strength

We had another write-up in Barron’s over the weekend, and this time the article featured our powerful Relative Strength screener, as well as our tabbed Views feature. We’ve gotten a lot of requests from users about how to recreate the research from the article, so we’re writing this blog post explaining how to run the screener, with screenshots.

First, you can either click the ‘Relative Strength’ item under ‘My Screeners’ in the Navigation panel, or, if you want to see the screener criteria first, click ‘Screen for Stocks’ in the Task Wizard, shown below.

This will bring up a window where you can choose a screener to run. Just select the Relative Strength screener, and you’ll be able to see the screener’s criteria.

So, you can see that our Relative Strength screener will choose the stocks (out of the North American Exchanges) that have 5-day return versus the S&P 500 greater than 1%, a 1-month return versus the S&P 500 greater than 2%, a 3-month return versus the S&P 500 greater than 5%, a 6-month return versus the S&P 500 greater than 10%, a 1-year return versus the S&P 500 greater than 12%, a 3-year return versus the S&P 500 greater than 25%, and a 5-year return versus the S&P 500 greater than 40%.

When you click ‘Run,’ all of those stocks that pass will load in the Table, shown below.

I’ve circled some other parts of the program that I want to point out as well. We are looking at the screener though the ‘Returns vs. S&P 500’ View, which you can select by clicking its tab at the top of the Table (circled). You’ll see in the Table’s header that 152 stocks pass the screener (boxed), but the Table only shows 100 stocks at a time, so you’ll have to page through at the bottom (circled) to see them all.

Right now the stocks are listed alphabetically, which you can tell because the Ticker column header is blue and there is an arrow to the left of it the column name (circled). But you can sort by a different column by just clicking another column header, so if I clicked the 1-day Return versus S&P 500, I could see the stocks that have the highest (or lowest) value for that metric.

You can also add in any stock to compare against this screener by typing it into the Research Box at the top of the Table. So I’ve typed in NFLX to see how Netflix measures up, shown below.

You can see that, in addition to being in the Research Box, it also appears in the Table bolded and italicized and with a superscripted ‘x’, all of which indicate that this is a Research Ticker and not necessarily part of the stocks that are loaded in the Table. If you have Ticker Info Tooltips enabled (in the Options menu at the top of the Stock Rover screen), you can mouseover any of the tickers in the Table to get a quick information box with more information on that ticker, so here you can see I can quickly access Netflix’s beta, volume, and market cap.

 

If you have the Chart ‘Linked’ to the Table (circled below), you can also have the stock that is higlighted in the Table chart below.

So here Netflix has been Charted, and I’ve added the S&P 500 in as a benchmark (through the ‘Benchmarks’ menu, circled) and I’ve set it as a baseline by clicking the graph icon to the right of the S&P 500 label in the legend (circled.) Finally, I’ve thrown in the Relative Strength Index in for good measure, which you can add through the ‘Technicals’ menu (circled). So you can see that over the past year Netflix has ultimately been outperforming the S&P 500, though it’s only been recently that it’s pulled ahead.

And there you have it, that sums up the main features that were highlighted in the Barron’s article. We hope you’ve found this blog post helpful, and let us know if you have further questions by emailing[email protected].