Stock screening is commonly deployed by investors to ‘cut through the noise.’ The approach is especially useful when you’re choosing from thousands of options, which can often overwhelm investors.
Taking a different angle, screening is essentially the same idea as constructing a grocery list. A list helps you easily navigate a store, allowing you to quickly find what you’re looking for without wasting a chunk of time.
Still, screening often feels overwhelming and confusing, especially when investors aren’t sure what to look for in a company. In addition, it’s not as simple as a one-size-fits-all approach, as market participants all have different preferences.
Let’s take a closer look at screening and a few parameters available at Zacks that investors can deploy to find the stocks that they want.
Screening Parameters
Parameters can be seen as the ‘ingredients’ of a recipe, excluding any irrelevant information. Digging deeper, parameters can be fine-tuned for any investing style, whether that be momentum, value, growth, or income-based.
Value Investing
Value investors can add several parameters to their screens to find high-quality stocks trading at a discount. A few of these include the Price-to-Earnings (P/E) ratio, the Price-to-Sales (P/S) ratio, and the Price-to-Book (P/B) ratio. Zacks has several premium screens tailored toward value-focused strategies that have these parameters built in.
Momentum Investing
Momentum investing is all about riding the current trend, jumping into stocks that have enjoyed buying pressure. A few parameters investors can deploy for momentum-focused screens include the percentage price change in the stock over the last month, average volume, and price as a percentage of the 52-week high-low range. Zacks has many momentum-based screens with these parameters built in.
Growth Investing
Growth-oriented strategies target companies expected to grow sales and earnings at an above-average rate, which often leads to share outperformance. A few key parameters for growth investors include last year’s earnings and sales growth rates, expected growth rates for the current year, and the long-term expected EPS growth rate.
One of the Zacks premium growth screens returned a notable stock: Bloom Energy BE. Bloom Energy delivered rock-solid results in its earnings release, easily beating our consensus expectations. The company posted record quarterly revenue of $1.07 billion, growing 166% year-over-year while also significantly raising its full-year 2026 outlook
The growth surge was driven by soaring demand for its solid-oxide fuel cell systems, as major U.S. hyperscalers and AI data center operators seek reliable on-site power.
Bloom Energy now expects full-year revenue in the $3.9 – $4.2 billion range, with positive revisions also flowing in for its next fiscal year following the release. The stock sports a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy), with EPS revisions remaining bullish across the board.
Image Source: Zacks Investment Research
Income Investing
Income-focused investing centers on income, with dividend-paying stocks often seen as more ‘stable.’ Many dividend-paying companies are mature and, at the end of their growth cycle, opt to share profits with shareholders rather than reinvesting for the future. A few parameters investors can deploy when searching for dividend-paying stocks include current dividend yield and the 5-year historical dividend growth rate. Like those above, Zacks already offers several premium income-focused screens.
Bottom Line
Screens are very useful tools for investors to filter out the noise, allowing for full focus on preferred parameters. The process can often be overwhelming, though, and some investors are unsure which parameters to include.
Zacks has many pre-built screens tailored toward common strategies, a list that includes growth, value, momentum, and income.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).
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