Stock Screen Review: MSN Custom Search

This is the second stock screen review in the series: The Ultimate List Of Web Based Stock Screening Tools

Video Transcript
Hello, this is the Trade Detective. And today, I’m going to be doing the next review in the ultimate list of web-based screening tools. And today’s screening tool is the MSN Custom Search.

The MSN Custom Search is a fundamental-based search, and it’s actually the most simple screening software that you can use on the Internet. This is how works. If you click on a link, for MSN Custom Search, this is what you’re going to get. And it allows you to search by industry and fundamental data.

So for instance: market cap. Is it listed in the Dow Jones Index, in the utilities, transport, or industrials? Is it listed in the S&P. And then a bunch of fundamental financial indicators: Does it pay a dividend? What’s its price-to-earnings ratio look like? What’s its relative strength in comparison to other stocks? How is their revenue growth?

So of course, there is no such thing as a perfect stock screen; there’s always going to be some analysis on your part of that particular stock. So let’s go ahead and execute one and we can take a look at the results.

So what I have here is, I did “Industry All”. What you could do here is, you could do some sector rotation theory and do some analysis on particular industries and sectors to see what’s hot right now. And you can filter down to stocks that are performing well.

For instance, we can do “Recently” Oil and gas has been doing pretty well. Let’s see, oil, gas and drilling, just for shenanigans. We’ll do “Any Market Cap”. We want a high dividend yield, and we want to have good revenue growth, and low debt. So we’ll go ahead and do a search.

Now this is obviously a bullish search, and you can see that it has come up with four different stocks. Once again, as a technical trader, the big deficit that MSN search has is it does not give you the ability to look at the chart for these stocks in bulk. In other words, what I would like to see is maybe a little button here that allows you to go directly to the chart, and then maybe a button over here that says “View Chart in Bulk”. And that way, they could have a little thumbnail of the charts.

What you can do–obviously, it says drilling and exploration. It’s listed on the S&P. Here’s the debt to equity ratio, here’s the current dividend yield, and here’s their revenue growth.

To me, the two best stocks would be ESV and DO. This one has very low debt. And it’s having pretty good growth, and its paying a good dividend. This one has a little bit more debt, but its dividend yield is very high and it’s got great growth. So you could do Diamond Offshore Drilling, and if you’re a fundamental analyst you would expect to see this chart, at least as of recently, be very bullish.

Now, you can see that the stock’s scouter rating which is the MSN proprietary rating for stocks is a 10, and which is as high as you can get. So this, fundamentally, is a very sound stock. You can quickly look at the stock price history and it says that over the last three months, its gained 17percent and over the last six months it gained 48 . Of course, over the last year it’s down off of its highs.

A bunch of other fundamental data, and of course, you can hit the charting button, and you get a basic chart of Diamond Offshore Drilling. This is one year to date, and sure enough, over the past six months it’s gone from a low of 55, and it’s headed back up to the century mark.

That’s the basics of the Custom Search. It’s very basic, and it can find you some stocks that may not be necessarily in a great pattern or technically ready to buy, but that are fundamentally sound, and a good place to start adding long-term type investments into your portfolio. Not necessarily trades, but long-term investment.

This is the Trade Detective from the tradedetective.com, and I hope you found this useful and stay tuned for more reviews of the ultimate list of web-based screening tools. Take care.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Tagged as: fundamental screen, msn, msn custom search, msn stock screen, stock scan, stock screen