stock screener
Stock Screener: a tool that filters thousands of shares down to a short list matching the criteria you set, so you are not guessing which company to research.
In plain English
How do you even begin to choose which shares to buy when there are thousands of companies listed on exchanges across the world? That question stops a lot of people before they start investing at all, and it is the exact problem a stock screener was built to solve.
A stock screener is a filter. You tell it what you care about, maybe companies with a dividend yield above 5%, or a share price under ₦50, or profit that has grown every year for the last five years, and it searches through the whole market and hands you back a shortlist that fits.
Think of a Nigerian investor sitting at home in Lagos who wants to buy shares on the Nigerian Exchange but has no interest in scrolling through every listed company one by one. She opens a screener, sets her filters for banking stocks with steady dividends and low debt, and within seconds she has five names instead of a hundred and fifty.
Someone in London doing the same thing on the FTSE, or a Nigerian in the diaspora comparing NYSE tech stocks before sending money home to invest through a local broker, uses the same logic. The screener does not tell you what to buy. It just clears away the noise so your own research has somewhere sensible to start.
Most trading apps and financial websites now have a free version built in, and the paid versions simply let you filter by more details or save your searches for later.
The real skill is not clicking the filter button. It is knowing which numbers actually matter to you before you start typing them in.
You set a screener to show only companies on the Nigerian Exchange with a dividend yield above 6% and a share price below ₦100. It returns eight names instead of the full list of over a hundred and fifty, and you now have a manageable pile to actually study.
Questions people ask
Is a stock screener free to use?
Many are. Most brokers and financial data sites offer a free version with basic filters like price, sector and dividend yield, while advanced filters and saved searches are often locked behind a paid plan.
Can a screener tell me if a stock is a good buy?
No, it only narrows the field based on the numbers you choose. Whether a company is actually a good buy still depends on you reading its financials and understanding its business.
Do screeners work for the Nigerian Exchange?
Yes, several Nigerian brokerage platforms and financial data sites now include screeners for NGX listed companies, though the range of filters may be simpler than what you find on tools built for the NYSE or the FTSE.
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