Since we've been having a special deal on Prospector recently, I wanted to put up a post regarding a program that usually doesn't get too much press.

At the most basic, Stock Prospector is a screening program that sorts through 8,000 plus companies and shows you stocks that match a certain set of criteria.

There are two basic ways to screen for companies in Stock Prospector; using a wizard, or defining screening criteria manually.

Since most new users will be going into the wizard, that's what I'll be looking at in this post. When you first open Prospector, the top part of the window looks like this:

From Stock Prospector

 

If this is your first time using Prospector, make sure to click the Import button, fill in your login and password, and then click Start Import. Once your data is imported, click OK to return to the opening screen.

From here, click either of the buttons that shows a Wizard’s hat to get to the Screening Wizard. Click Next to pass the welcome screen, and you’ll see this:

From Stock Prospector

The Pre-defined Wizards are a set of criteria put together by us to act as a place to start screening for stocks, and learning how the program operates. You can see the specific criteria for each of these wizards by clicking the Criteria button on the front page of Stock Prospector, but for this example, I’m going to pick the first one in the list: Growth Companies, and then click Next. The next page will show how many companies that particular wizard found to meet its criteria. In this case, I got 13 out of 8,474

From Stock Prospector

Click Finish, and Prospector will sort through those companies, and display them on the main screen, similar to this:

From Stock Prospector

You’ll notice a few things here, in Purple text:

·         There were five screening criteria used. Prospector uses a progressive filter, where each new criteria only looks at the stocks that made it through the previous one.  

·         There are 20 report items. These are the columns showing information such as company name, Symbol, Exchange, etc. These can be changed without affecting the number of companies found and displayed by the criteria, by clicking the Report button, and adding or removing items.

·         There are 13 out of 8,474 records selected. This is just a reminder of how many companies were found using the screening criteria.

From  here, any company listed can be double-clicked on to open up a screen showing the front page of a very simplified ssg:

From Stock Prospector

You can choose to graph several different items, such as High and low price, Revenue, Debt to Equity, and several others. You can also click the Rank button to see how the company ranked on each of the individual criteria used in the screen. As well, you’ll notice buttons to save the report, print it, or open your web browser to the stockcentral research page for that company.

 

This is only scratching the surface of Prospector, since it doesn’t go into the custom wizard (which allows you to use four sliding bars to set the importance of Growth, Value, Quality and Safety) , the fully manual screening criteria, and the ability to select report items. For something a bit less static, I would also suggest to take a look at the Stock Prospector specific webinar on our archive page at:

http://www.iclub.com/clubs/webinar_information.asp

Beyond this, I would certainly encourage folks to discuss the program here, and to experiment with both the custom wizard, and the manual criteria options.