Top 5 Stock Screeners for Indian Stocks (BSE / NSE)

With over 1600 stocks listed on NSE and around 5000 stocks listed on BSE, selecting stocks for investment is not easy if there is no filtration mechanism. For example if you were to find companies which are having market value of more than 5000 crores but less than 10000 crores and a PE multiple of less than 6, it would take days to manually filter stocks matching this criteria. 

Fortunately some of the companies in India are providing stock screeners free of cost to help you in your research and filter stocks based on several quantitative parameters. Following is the list of top 5 stock screeners for Indian Stock Markets.

Google Stock Screener - A relatively newer option for stock screening on Indian Markets, Google finance provides a reasonably good stock screener where you can just slide the criteria bars and the list of stocks is filtered dynamically – this makes your market research task simpler because you don’t have to submit forms each time you make a minor adjustment.

Edelweiss Stock Screener  - Edelweiss has 10 ready-to-use/ inbuilt screeners also known as Power Screeners. They also have a custom Stock Screener which you can use to filter stocks based on the input parameters.

IDBI Paisabuilder - A relatively new player in broking, IDBI Paisabuilder provides very extensive stock screener. Here you can select upto 6 parameters at a time out of 25+ parameters given on the screeing page.

ICICI Direct Custom Search - ICICI Direct, one of India's top stock brokers provides a basic custom screener for listed stock on NSE / BSE but a very powerful predefined screener to help you narrow down your set of stocks. The pre-defined screener is specially helpful to people who are not much comfortable with custom criteria and it's use and thus cannot effectively use them to filter stocks.

HDFC Securities Stock Screener - One of the best stock filtration platform for Indian markets till date, HDFC securities provide 17 predefined fundamental and 12 predefined technical screeners which is extremely helpful in stock research. It also has a custom screener for your tailored requirement.

For stock listed on US stock exchanges, top 3 free screeners on the web include those offered by Yahoo Finance, MSN Money and FinViz. All these have basic as well as advanced screeners. 

Limitations:

• Most stock screeners include only quantitative factors. There are still many qualitative factors to keep in mind: no screener provides information about things like pending lawsuits, labor problems or customer-satisfaction levels. 

• Screeners use databases that update on different schedules. Always check how fresh the data is - if a screener's data isn't upto date, the search result could be meaningless.