FinViz

FinViz is a comprehensive online stock screener that sets itself apart from other screeners by focusing heavily on visualization tools. FinViz is popular among beginner day traders and long-term investors alike thanks to its affordability and much of the platform is free to use. In addition, unlike other stock screeners, FinViz offers a news service as well as the ability to view futures, forex, and cryptocurrencies.

FinViz Pricing Options

A surprising amount of FinViz’s platform is free to use, including stock screener and information on futures, forex, and cryptocurrency. Traders can also register for free to enable saving up to 50 portfolios and 50 screener presets.

However, unlocking all of FinViz’s features with the FinViz Elite service costs $39.50 per month or $299.50 per year. The biggest difference in this upgrade for day traders is that stock data is delayed by three minutes in the free version of FinViz, but is offered in realtime to Elite users. FinViz Elite also offers additional charting features, including the ability to apply technical studies and to backtest technical studies. The Elite level also comes with email alerts based on price changes, insider trading, or stock news, as well as the option to save up to 100 portfolios and 100 screener presets.

FinViz Features

Stock Screener

The stock screener is at the heart of FinViz and is incredibly friendly. The screener offers 63 different filters with values that can be selected from drop-down menus, but not entered manually. The filters can be divided into descriptive filters – which include information about market cap and sector – fundamental filters – which include information about P/E and earnings growth – and technical filters – which include information about where a stock sits relative to its 20-day or 50-day moving average. In addition, the screener offers a market-wide signal search that allows a fast scan for the top gainers and losers over the day as well as searching for stocks based on analyst ratings.

Registered users can save up to 50 preset scans within the screener and can save the results of a screen as a portfolio, up to 50 portfolios. While some traders may appreciate the pop-up charts that appear when hovering over ticker results from the scanner, the charts are not particularly useful for making trading decisions.

Futures, Forex, and Crypto

The futures, forex, and crypto screens of FinViz display information about these different types of financial products in much the same way. FinViz offers a landscape-wide view of how prices for different commodities or currencies are changing using a green and red color-coding system with prices and price changes displayed prominently. Charts for each commodity or currency pair can be activated by hovering over the price display and can be toggled between five minute, hourly, daily, and monthly timescales.

Heatmaps and Bubble Charts

One of the unique features of FinViz, where the visualization component of the platform comes into play, is in the heatmaps and bubble charts that can be used to supplement the stock screener. The heatmaps group stocks according to their sector and size boxes according to market capitalization, then use a green and red color scale to indicate price performance. The timescale of the price performance can be adjusted from one day to several months, while the boxes can also be colored according to fundamental factors such as P/E and dividend yield.

The bubble chart is perfect for traders who want a visual stock scanner. The X- and Y-axes of the chart can be customized to display price, market cap, EPS growth, year-to-date performance, or a variety of other stock features, while the addition of color and size settings allows for essentially two more variables to be examined simultaneously. Hovering over any bubble pops up additional information about the stock, including a small chart.

News

Another welcome feature of FinViz is the News tab, which includes stock-related headlines pulled from across the Internet. The news is separated into stories from mainstream news services and stories from blogs to provide additional context about its reliability. While only headlines are displayed, hovering over the headline pops up the lead of the story. However, don’t expect this news service to be as complete or as searchable as news-forward trading services like Benzinga Pro and Briefing.com.

FinViz is entirely browser-based, which makes it easy for most traders to use within a single window or on a single monitor. The platform is laid out in tabs that clearly demarcate the information, and there is relatively little about the layout that can be changed.

Top Platform Features

What sets FinViz apart from competing stock scanners is not the scanner itself, but the visualization features that are available on the platform. The heatmaps make it easy to take a birds-eye view of the landscape within a sector, while the bubble charts are invaluable for investors who simply don’t find a scan table helpful for identifying which stocks offer opportunities for profit. Best of all, these visualization tools are free and don’t require signing up for FinViz Elite. That said, FinViz is lacking in advanced charting capabilities and the ability to apply technical studies without Elite membership.

Should You Use FinViz?

FinViz is ideal for both beginning traders and more experienced day traders, although the latter will want to invest in FinViz Elite to get access to real-time data and advanced charting capabilities. For traders without access to a scanner through their brokerage, the free version of FinViz can be a boon. In addition, FinViz is especially suited for traders who find the visualization tools – the heatmaps and bubble plots – more useful for picking out particular stocks from a scan than a standard results table.

Pros

• Powerful stock scanner with numerous quick filters, including top gainers and ratings-based filters
• Includes heatmap-based visualization of futures, forex, and cryptocurrency performance
• Heatmaps offer quick overview of sector performances and intra-sector stock comparisons
• Bubble plots are a visual alternative to scan table for identifying potential stocks to trade
• Most features are free to use and annual membership is priced reasonably

Cons

• Data is delayed by three minutes in free version
• Scanner filters cannot be entered manually, limited to built-in drop-down options
• Charting capabilities are minimal in free version