Wouldn’t it be fine if you had a piece of software that could help you narrow down your stock search so you could look at just a slice of the stock market? Well, meet FinViz, a popular stock scanner with a number of unpaid features for every type of investor.

FinViz is a tool that investors can use to quickly get a handle on what’s going on in the stock market. It is a manner of visualizing patterns in stocks and in the market as a whole, and a way of drilling down to access details on particular types of information.

Beginner stock market investors might look for stocks to have certain characteristics, like share price or market cap, and more advanced traders can look for more advanced signals, like insider buying. There are also features for technical traders, and even in the free version of the software, technical signals can be used, like candlestick patterns and more.

What’s a Stock Scanner?

FinViz is among a category of stock scanners. They are built to help investors and traders make better sense of all the information the stock market creates at every single minute of every single trading day by interpreting the data, generating more digestible snapshots, and filtering the noise.

Not only can you use a stock scanner to identify some of the basic details about the kind of stocks you play or follow, but if you know what features you’re buying or selling based on, it can help you plan out your next moves.

Index futures, options, and exchange-traded funds can be put under the microscope with many stock scanner platforms, too, though they are developed for stock traders.

FinViz Features

FinViz provides its users with a basic set of features for looking up stocks and monitoring them.

There’s some other stuff about the software as well, that you might be interested in if you are out there considering the Space Force…errrrr, I mean a stock scanner. These include:

1. Heatmaps

These FinViz heatmaps allow for visualizing the U.S. and other world stock markets as well. You can then dice those in different directions, such as performance over a certain period, metrics, like the price/earnings-to-growth (PEG) ratio, price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio, and even dividend yields.

So, for example, in the default view, if I select the S&P 500 and then elect “Dividend Yield,” you’ll see a whole bunch of different stocks, which are organized by those tickers and then by industries, and by sectors, and then sectors within them.

The highest dividend yields shine the lightest green, and the stocks with no dividend yield are black, so it’s a little easier to narrow your search.

2. Industry Analysis

When you navigate to the “Groups” tab on FinViz, you’ll see essentially an industry analysis tool. You can select the “Group” that aligns with the industry that interests you and the style in which you’d like to visualize that group.

For example, selecting “Real Estate,” then “Overview,” shows you the different sectors within real estate, such as real estate investment trusts (REITs). At a glance, then, you can compare the sectors within real estate, based on metrics such as P/E ratio, PEG ratio, and dividend yield.

3. Stock Screener

Extend that industry analysis one step further. The stock screener (accessed from under the “Screener” tab) can help you weed out the filth and get down to the stocks you really want to be looking at.

For example, you could screen within the “Descriptive” tab for only industrial REITs that have a dividend yield of more than 5%, and then screen that reduced list in the “Fundamental” tab to find stocks that have a positive P/E ratio and return on equity. Now, suddenly, you have only four stocks to check out of the entire market.

Why Investors Should Care About FinViz

A tool like FinViz can help you as you filter through a field of thousands of stocks to find a select few that meet your criteria. You can also monitor your trades, search for types of signals, and generally feel more on the ball in terms of your investments.

FinViz is one of the stock scanners available. That’s not to say we can make specific recommendations for these tools, but the free version is bloatware for it.

This can be very useful for newer traders or stock investors, who just don’t have a lot of time to go deep into the specifics of all the stocks and only want a short list.

Deciding whether to use a stock scanner is a personal call, but platforms like FinViz can do much of the more mundane legwork out of stock selection if that’s how you’re using them.