Stock Screen Review: MSN Power Searches

The Trade Detective: [0:01] Hello. This is The Trade Detective and this is the first review I’m doing as part of the ultimate list of web based stock screening tools. Today we’re looking at the MSN Power Searches. What the MSN Power Searches are is a list of predefined scans, technical and fundamental scans that have been put together by the people at MSN. [0:25] I will say that the technical screens are fairly simplistic, but there are some of them in there that are useful. In fact, I’m going to do the review today based on one of those. And then you also have fundamental stock screens which are kind of based on various fundamental data.

[0:44] So before we get started, one of the advantages of using the MSN screen software is that you get the entire list of tools and information that is available from MSN. They tend to have a lot more data than a lot of the other stock screening tools. Pretty much, some of those just give you the basics. Like, for instance, you can click on earnings estimates.

[1:12] Let’s pull up a stock. I’m just going to pull up a well known stock. We’ll pull up Microsoft. If you were to click on earnings estimates, it will tell you what the earnings estimates are, whether they’re growing, whetherthey’re shrinking, et cetera, et cetera.

[1:29] If there’s any kind of surprises, positive or negative; your consensus trends, all that kind of thing. Analyst ratings, it will tell you what all of the analyst ratings are against the stock. Microsoft, right now, looks like a pretty good moderate buy based on what you’re seeing here.

[1:43] So you know there’s a lot of information that you get from using the Microsoft Screening. So what I am going to do today is do a technical screen. And the screen is the price closed above the 200 day moving average.

[1:59] This is usually a pretty good indicator that the stock is breaking out of a bottoming pattern and it looks like it may have some upside potential on the market. Today is July 30, 2009. The market has been in a bit of a bullish trend. I expect it to correct here pretty soon, but it still has a bullish bias at this point.

[2:25] So, when you run this screen, this is what you get. You get the symbol, the name of the company, what the 200 day moving average is, the closing price, the percent change today and the market cap. I’m not sure why they chose some of these columns for a technical screen, but that’s what they did.

[2:44] So, what we are going to do is I’m going to go ahead and find a stock that is above $10 because I prefer to trade stocks that are above $10 that closed above its 200 day moving average. So, let’s take a look at this. This is Olympic Steel. The 200 day moving average is at $18.70. It closed at $25 and today it made a nice 14% move, which is an indication that it probably broke out of some kind of overhead resistance.

[3:15] So, let’s look at Zeus Olympic Steel. Now, like I said, when you pull up a stock, you get the typical MSN screen with all the information you could possibly want about the stock; today’s trading information, recent news, any types of video releases, financial highlights, and then of course all of the different research information that they have available over here.

[3:46] And the next thing that they have, of course, is the stock chart. And, the Microsoft Charting package is somewhat basic however it does have some technical analysis tools if you wanted to do something that’s fairly basic.

[4:03] It shows some moving averages, you can constrain the dates, you can change the chart type from line, candlestick, high, low, close, open, high, low, close. But for now we’re looking at a line chart. And, let’s go ahead and put in the 200 day moving average and redraw the chart.

[4:26] What we will see here is that it did indeed close above the 200 day moving average, and it looks like this stock is breaking out of a really long basing pattern here.

[4:41] This is almost looking like you have a little bit of a head and shoulders bottom here, or a rounded bottom. And it looks like as it breaks above this 25 level, here, that there is some really good upside potential for this particular stock. So, that is what the charts look like. And you can change the size of this and whatever else if you want to take a look at it.

[5:08] The one drawback of all of the Microsoft screening is that when you get the list of results, there is no way to preview the charts of the symbols returned.

[5:23] So if you wanted to, say, go through this list of stocks quickly as a technical analyst, there is no way to look at the charts as a conglomerate. You have to do them one at a time. So that, I would say, is one of the main drawbacks of the MSN screening technology.

[5:43] That’s today’s review. If you have any questions or comments, of course, please write a comment on this video post as well as the original post, which is the Ultimate List of Web Based Stock Screens. This is The Trade Detective. Have a nice day.