Fidelity Stock Screener – How to Guide

In the video below, I go through how to use Fidelity’s Stock Screener. The stock screener at Fidelity greatly helps reduce the amount of stocks to research-it allows you to zero in on particular strategies. Those strategies might include dividends, growth stocks, or even stocks from a particular sector. You can set up the Fidelity stock screener for whatever strategy you’d like.

What you’ll learn in this Fidelity Stock Screener Guide?

First, I take you through a Dividend Stock screen, looking at a medium range yield and higher dividend growth. (As always, it’s important to look for stocks that are growing their dividends, not only ones with a high yield.)

Next, I add in more metrics like Price to Book, this is useful in value stock screens used by many investors. I then add a Price to Cash ratio to the stock screen. Price to Cash is something I ALWAYS look at with stocks. This can be another value stock screen.

In summary, by the time you’re done, you’ll know how to use the Fidelity stock screener to find stocks with nice dividends, dividend growth and decent overall value metrics.

Another tool in the Fidelity Stock screener I like to use is the function that allows you to search for stocks by percentage above 52 week lows. This helps finding stocks that MIGHT be undervalued, trading at lower multiples.

Steps to starting the stock screen on Fidelty

1. Go to the Fidelity Homepage
2. Click on News and Research
3. Click on Stocks
4. Click on Stock Screeners
5. Click on Start a Screen

This takes you to the screen where you can start applying filters to your stock screen. You can follow along with the video here:

Basic Stock Screener parameters and results

How to do a Basic Dividend Screen:

1. Dividend
2. Dividend Yield
3. Select % Dividend Yield you wish to screen for (I did High, Medium, and Low)
4. Left click on Dividend Yield column to arrange ascending or descending order.

How to add in Dividend growth to the stock screen:

• Dividend Growth
• 1 Year Growth
• Select Growth Percentages.

This yields SIX pages, so still not manageable, we need to narrow down our list some more. Let’s look at Price-To-Book

Narrowing down the Stock Screen with Price-to-Book

• Company Value
• Price-to-Book
• Select ranges (I selected Low, Very Low, Medium)
• Rearrange in Descending order by clicking on the right column.

This narrows down our selections to four pages. We are on the right track, but maybe a few more screens.

Adding in Price to Cash Flow ratio to eliminate further.

• Company Value
• Price To Cash Flow
• Select Very Low, Low, and Medium

We now have three pages and 295 results. I think we are almost there with our screen

Adding in the 52 week Parameter

• Performance & Volatility
• Select % above the 52 week low

Now we have only 167 Results. This is a good screen to use to look for bargains. This is much more manageable than the 1375 I began with.

As you can see, the beauty of a stock screener is it gradually allows you to trim away the things you don’t want. You’ll start with thousands of options and cut it down to hundreds. I stopped at this 4th parameter; however, you could keep going until you get only 50 or so choices. I think there is a danger in cutting it down too much; you might miss something with parameters too narrow on your stock screen.

Now let’s change up what we are looking for: Perhaps you want a stock with lots of growth and good Return on Equity? Low Beta? High Profit Margins?

You can target all of these using Fidelity’s Stock Screener.

Please keep in mind-numbers can only tell you so much. They don’t tell you about what’s going on in the economy day to day necessarily, or particular challenges the company is facing. So, a stock screener, while a good start, is not enough research. You have to go further, make sure the company has some sort of competitive edge, that there are no scandals or big lawsuits facing the company.

Hopefully this video and write up on how to use the Fidelity Stock Screener was useful. If you have a Fidelity account, there are even more great resources in your account to help on your quest for the best stocks.