Finviz Review

My Finviz review covers the entire Finviz stock screener, with general information about to the free Finviz screener, then you’ll find insights into the paid version Finviz Elite, and finally a guide on how to use Finviz with my favorite scanner settings.

Transparency: We may get compensated when you click on links in this article.

What is Finviz?

Finviz is one of the best stock screeners (available as free version, and paid Finviz Elite subscription) and the name Finviz stands for “financial visualizations”. The company was founded by Juraj Duris in June 2007, and right now about 25.3 million people use their website every month.

Register for Free and Check the Current Finviz Elite Promotions

Features

Finviz is well known for its simplicity. But Finviz is more powerful than one would expect using it the first time.

Fast Search

Enter a stock symbol like “AAPL” in the upper left search box.

It takes only a fraction of a second until you see the results separated into three main categories:

In the upper left you have the option to:

• Publish a chart
• Save it to a portfolio
• Create an alert

The “publish chart” option is free to use. You need at least a free Finviz account to save a stock to a portfolio. To create an alert, you need Finviz Elite.

Free Finviz Chart AAPL (with daily, weekly and monthly time frame and delayed prices)

Finviz Elite Chart AAPL (with intraday time frames and real-time prices)

Three chart types are available:

• candle, line and advanced charts for free and
• interactive- and performance-based charts for Finviz Elite users.

You can also adjust the time frame in the upper right to toggle between daily, weekly, and monthly in the free Finviz version and the real-time intraday charts with Finviz Elite.

There are also various key figures available just below the chart, like P/E, Dividends, and various performance figures.

Finally, various Finviz news sources are listed at the very bottom of the results page for each stock.

Charting types:

• Candle (Free)
• Line (Free)
• Advanced (Free)
• Interactive (Elite)
• Performance (Elite)

Time Frames:

• Intraday (Elite)
• Daily (Free)
• Weekly (Free)
• Monthly (Free)

News

The newsfeed lists the latest news and articles according to news and blogs either chronologically or – if selected – by origin. The sources are well-known media such as Bloomberg, CNN, MarketWatch, and many others. In addition, many prominent financial blogs are part of the list.

Stock Screener

The stock screener is to 90% of what Finviz is all about. All these other little gadgets are a great addition, but the stock screener itself is where Finviz shines.

The best Finviz screener settings are part of my guide on How to use Finviz, which you’ll find at the end of this post. You do not need Finviz Elite to use the different filters, but you need Finviz Elite to create price alerts and to export the results with a click on “export” in the lower right corner. Also, you need Finviz Elite to take a closer look at the statistics.

Also, besides the data export and statistics functionality, Finviz Elite also comes with advanced charts and even more customizable filters like market cap ranges, P/E ranges, etc.

Programs like MS Excel are still the best way to crunch the data. If you export all data every day, then you can also create your own alternative to Yahoo Finance API. Just collect the data, build your own database, and make the right investment decision at the right time.

Finviz Heat Maps

Now let’s proceed with this Finviz stock screener review by taking a closer look at the Finviz heat maps functionality. The tool quickly provides an overview with its very informative graphics.

They show which shares are moving in what direction (red = falling, green = rising) and market significance (area size). Maps may be selected for S&P500, World Stock, Industry (Technology, Financial, Consumer, etc.) and ETFs.

Groups

The Groups tab provides a snapshot of the groupings.

• Sectors
• Industries
• Countries
• Capitalization

The values listed as tables can also be viewed as a bar chart, spectrum (display), grid (display), and as charts. You can choose between various time frames, and you can combine multiple settings.

I do not use this functionality that much, but it provides clear visual guidance on how sectors and industries perform each given day or on a larger time frame. If you like to stay with the trend of the indices like the S&P and on top of that with a sector, then Finviz helps you to understand the data better with visualization.

Portfolio

The portfolio functionality is only available to Finviz Elite subscribers. Later in this Finviz review, I will talk about Finviz Elite in detail. There you also find all the important things about the Finviz portfolio.

Insider

The list of insider transactions will be presented in descending order as of the date of the announcement by the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission). It can be sorted and filtered according to buy or sale transactions, among other criteria like:

• Latest Insider Trading
• Top Insider Trading Recent Week
• Top 10% Owner Trading Recent Week

Futures

The menu function “Futures” provides investors with a quick overview by a representation in colored tiles, as currently happens on the futures market. Finviz futures charts are available by hovering over the quote or by clicking on it.

Included are commodities, bonds, precious metals, and currencies, and the different shades in green or red indicate the daily performance in the positive and negative range.

The price data is shown in extra-large font, including the respective daily highs and lows. A daily performance chart from light green (top performance) to light red (worst performance) is below the future tiles.

Forex

In the Forex section, you get an overview of the major currency pairs.

Current prices can be displayed as tiles. In addition, the performance data for the tiles can be displayed as a table, including a column diagram (tops and flops) or in each case only as charts.

Crypto

Currently, there are performance numbers and charts for 15 cryptocurrencies, while TradingView streames about 200 of them. The clear tiled presentation follows the same system as for the forex values.

This is just another nice financial visualization feature.

Backtests and Historical Data

The backtesting feature is only available to paying Finviz Elite customers.

Here are some benefits:

• 100 backtestable technical indicators
• option to compare the results with the SPY benchmark and
• 16 years of historical data database

Now let’s get straight to the Finviz Elite benefits. Is Finviz Elite worth it? The next few paragraphs will answer that question!

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Finviz Elite Review

Finviz Elite includes real-time market data (including pre-market data), advanced charts, more technical studies, a backtesting module, a stock correlation feature, and some additional functionalities. Let’s get through it step by step and also look at the costs involved when subscribing.

Real-Time and Pre-Market Data

Finviz Elite comes with real-time data and also provides access to the pre-market session, where the available time frames start at the 1-minute time frame, while tick charts are not available.

Advanced Charts and Technical Studies

Advanced charting features like intraday-charts, indicator overlays, drawing tools, and the performance comparison charting are available with your paid subscription.

As I lined out earlier, two charting types are not included in the free Finviz version.

• Interactive charts and
• performance charts

Here is a screenshot of the interactive charting feature.

As you can see, you have more time-frames available. You can choose everything up from 1 minute to monthly. Also, drawing tools like lines and Fibonacci and a full-screen mode is available. One thing I miss here is a zoom functionality.

However, since finviz.com is web-based and not a standalone-tool, such a zoom feature would be a bit difficult to implement. Finviz clearly focuses on speed. The other charting feature is the performance comparison chart.

You can visualize the price development from your favorite tickers for a chosen time span. Here is an example of AAPL in relation to SPY:

Backtest Modul

The backtesting feature is an interesting one but not as close as good as the one from Trade Ideas. The user-interface is okay, and you can create a new backtest by clicking on “create your first backtest.”

You can create the backtest with a few mouse clicks. That’s cool and intuitive.

You can even include transaction costs into the calculation, add different entry conditions and exit conditions. Even a stop loss level and a time-based exit can be configured. Or course, you can test long-strategies and short strategies with Finviz Elite.

For the entry-and exit conditions, you can choose from a long list of different trading indicators and chart patterns. Once you hit the “run backtest” button, the magic begins. And a few seconds later you see the result. First of all, you see a graph with some key figures.

Also, you see the most important statistics:

And even a monthly return-table is available:

Finviz strength is clearly the long term backtest data on a daily price action level. However, Finviz Elite falls short when it comes to complex trading strategies and intraday-backtests.

Anyway, for less than $25 per month, you get all the intraday-data plus a great backtest engine. That’s already cool, but now let’s have a look at the correlations feature.

Correlations Feature

So whats the correlations feature all about? Finviz proprietary correlation algorithms find stocks that are related to another one. Why is this helpful? Let’s assume that you have a top list showing the best-performing tickers of today.

Often, other stocks related to this stock move later once traders and investors realize, that they correlate. And this is where this feature comes into play. Let’s assume that APPL prices go through the roof.

Type in the Apple-ticker AAPL, and then you see the correlations and inverse correlations just above the statements section.

Advanced Screener Functionalities

Let’s proceed with the Finviz review by taking a closer look at one of the most underestimated features of Finviz Elite. Did you think, that the free screener could not be beaten? It can!

The advanced screener functionalities included in Finviz Elite provide you:

• In depth statistics
• Data export functionalities
• Advanced charts
• Customized filters

Finviz Elite comes with more statistics. I do not use them that much, but for value investors and long term investors, they might be beneficial.

The feature I love the most is the data export feature. All you have to do is to set up a screener of choice and hit the little “export” link at the bottom right. That’s it; now you can download the entire content.

And here is a little trick for all data enthusiasts. Click on “screener,” then “custom” and select all potential content fields of your screener. Now hit the export-link.

And guys, I mean this is huge, you get the whole content from all the data in one CSV-file. It is ridiculous that you can get all this data for less than a dollar per day.

Notifications and Price Alerts

Okay, the Finviz review comes closer to the summary. The notification and price alert feature is a neat one, but your trading platform will probably have a better on.

However, it is included in Finviz Elite. So, feel free to give it a try.

Go to “info” at the upper right and choose “settings.” There you chose “alerts.” There you can set up your alerts.

Customization Options

The customization options provide you the opportunity to fine-tune the visual appealing of Finviz Elite. Here are the available settings:

There are also some other little features, but it would make this Finviz Elite review a bit too long to mention all the little details. I am convinced that you will discover them yourself once you subscribed to Finviz Elite.

Plans | Costs | Pricing

The core functionalities of Finviz.com can be used for free, while some more features are available for registered users only, and there are also features that are only available in the paid plan of Finviz Elite:

Finviz Elite costs $39.50 per month or $299.50 per year (The annual plan saves you $174.50 per year compared to the month-by-month subscription). If you are unsatisfied with Finviz Elite during the first 30 days, then you receive a full refund of your subscription fees.

Free Trial | Promo Code

Since 2008, I’ve never seen any Finviz Elite promo codes or discounts, other than the discounted price of the annual plan vs. 12 monthly payments. Since you get your money back if you cancel within the first 30 days, you could see it this way, that there is a 30-day trial of Finviz Elite.

Finviz Review Summary

The Finviz website does an exceptional job visualizing and summarizing valuable information in charts, maps, graphs and lists. Each tool comes in an easy to use and highly appealing format. Finviz is the most frequently used stock screener amongst investors with a free and paid Finviz Elite plan.

How To Use Finviz – Beginner Guide

I wrote a little guide that helps you getting started with both Finviz versions, the Finviz free plan, and the Finviz Elite Plan.

How to use Finviz for Free

Finviz can be used without registration. But I strongly recommend you to register for the free Finviz version.

A free registration enables you to have free access to these fantastic features:

• 50 portfolios per user
• 50 tickers per portfolio
• Screener presets
• Ability to customize the layout

All you need to register is an email address. No worries, Finviz doesn’t send you tons of advertisement emails, so your inbox will stay clean.

So, sign-up for free now, grab a cup of coffee and practice the little tricks I tell you about next.

Special Offer: Click Here to Register for Free and to Check the Current Finviz Elite Promotions

Screener Presets

Let’s start with the screener presets functionality. This alone is worth it to sign up for the free Finviz screener because it saves you so much time.

In this guide, I will save every custom scanner as a “screener preset,” and then, they are available in the dropdown.

You can also see all your saved screeners here:

• Click “info” in the upper right
• Chose “settings” from the dropdown
• Click “screener presets” in the navigation

Create Your Custom Stock Screener

Low float small caps can literally explode when news comes out. Especially if the short float is already at a decent level.

So, let’s see how to customize the Finviz screener looking for such stocks.

As with every screener, you can define it by just clicking at “Screener” in the main navigation.

Then, I recommend you always to use the “All”-tab to show all possible configurations.

To set up the small caps scan, adjust the following settings:

• Exchange: Nasdaq
• Market Cap: Small
• Price: Over $1
• Float Short: Over 10%
• Average Volume: Over 100K

These settings limit the results down to about 100 stocks. To find those stocks which are very active today, add the Finviz screener setting:

• Relative Volume: Over 3

Now, sort it via the column “Change.”

Today, I had only 5 stocks in the results list. Let’s have a look at the stock at the intraday chart of the leader “GOGO”:

You will agree that there were plenty of opportunities to trade this stock from the 5-minute chart alone. Please note, that intraday-charts are only available with Finviz Elite.

Now, let’s say that you are also of my opinion that this could be a good screener that you like to use more frequently.

You could do this by repeating the whole procedure every time by using Finviz without any registration.

Or you could just sign up for free and save the screen in the following way:

Select “My Presets” in the upper left and then click “Save Screen” to save this screener.

You can create up to 50 Finviz screeners presets within Finviz Free, and up to 100 presets in Fiviz Elite.

Once you clicked save screen, the screener preset menu will open.

As mentioned before, follow these steps to see all your preset screeners at once:

• Click “info” in the upper right
• Chose “settings” from the drop-down
• Click “screener presets” in the navigation

Here you can edit or remove them.

If you are a bit more advanced, then you can adjust the code line (in yellow) with new filters.

Here is the “code line” for our configuration:

v=111&f=cap_small,exch_nasd,sh_avgvol_o100,sh_price_o1,sh_relvol_o3,sh_short_o10&ft=4&o=-change

Please note, and this is important, you need to hit “SAVE CHANGES.”

Otherwise, all your screener presets get lost.

So what’s the benefit?

Well, have a look:

Now, our preset screen is available in the main dropdown of the stock screener. Pretty cool, right?

As I said, you can configure up to 50 of those preset screeners by just registering for the free Finviz version.

Screening Criteria

Finviz has a ton of screening criteria that you can use to filter stocks based on your goals and strategies. The criteria is divided into three main categories: descriptive, fundamental and technical.

Descriptive Criteria

Descriptive criteria is basic information about a stock, market cap, industry, sector and volume. You can use these to filter stocks based on size, sector and volume.

Fundamental Criteria

Fundamental criteria is financial metrics that gives you insight into a company’s financial health and performance.

Technical Criteria

Technical criteria is technical indicators and patterns that gives you insight into a stock’s price action and trend. You can use these to filter stocks based on technical indicators like moving averages, relative strength index (RSI) and Bollinger Bands. For example, you can screen for stocks with 50 day moving average above 200 day moving average, that’s a strong uptrend.

Use Finviz’s criteria to find stocks that fit your goals and strategies. Whether you’re a pro or a newbie.

Okay, now we covered how to use Finviz by creating a custom scanner.

Now let’s take it a step further and see how you can export and scrape data from your free Finviz version.

Export and Scrape Finviz as an Alternative to Yahoo Finance API

You may ask yourself: Stop, didn’t you told us in the Finviz Stock Screener Review, that the export-functionality is only available for Finviz Elite users?

While this is true, there is a nice way to export data anyway.

It is not that comfortable, but if you only need this data now and there, then it might be worth it for you.

Let’s say; you have defined a stock screener with 183 stocks.

Sadly, you cannot show more than 20 stock tickers at once (without registering) in the results.

So now, you have 10 pages at the bottom to scroll through.

You can easily export the data with copy and paste to MS Excel. But you have to repeat this over and over again. In this example, 10 times.

To do so, mark up the content:

Now you can copy it to MS Excel.

Scrape Finviz Data as an Alternative?

Scraping Finviz data is against their terms of use. Especially heaving data scraping could get you in trouble.

If you are aware of the MS-Office functionality on how to import web-content, then you can easily save a procedure which does what you want by using the search parameters and HTML-strings as a baseline.

That might be a grey zone. But I am not sure here.

In my opinion, you can use the copy & paste method without a problem, and a little MS Excel script shouldn’t be a big problem either.

If you need data more frequently, then Finviz Elite is your solution.

With Finviz Elite, you can download all the data at any time for any stock ticker with one simple click on “export.”

Let’s proceed with this guide on how to use Finviz with exactly this export functionality.

How to use Finviz Elite

As you saw, the free version of Finviz provides tons of benefits. But trust me, Finviz Elite takes things to the next level and offers high value for a low price.

Export Data with Finviz Elite

If you love data as I do, then this functionality will become your favorite one as a Finviz Elite user.

Before, we talked about custom screeners.

There, Finviz does nothing more but just reducing the number of results from their database and show you those results in proper order.

However, as a data scientist or Algo-Trader, you may be interested in using Finviz data differently.

Instead of filtering down the date in the Finviz screener frontend, you can also export the data with one mouse click.

To make the most out of it, you can follow these steps:

• Sign up for Finviz Elite
• Select “Screener” in the top navigation
• Do NOT choose any filter!
• Click “custom.”
• Click Settings

Now, chose all the criteria you want:

And simply hit “export” in the lower right, save the file and open the CSV-file.

Make sure to have the right settings in place, otherwise, your import will look like this:

You can prevent this by either using English language settings or by importing the data with “Text in columns” in Excel, using the modifier “,”as the separator.

Most of you will have the correct visualization immediately:

Now, in my case, I have content from column “A” to “BS” in MS Excel. 71 columns, this is a lot to work with.

Of course, you can merge CSV-files, import them to other programs, write an API, and develop your own Algo-Trading system.

Or, you just use it for later reference.

If you are a beginner and using Microsoft Excel, then I recommend you use the Pivot or Power Pivot functionalities to test, sort, define, filter, etc. It’s worth it!

Using Charts in Finviz Elite

I agree; the data export might not be for everyone. But this is only one functionality of Finviz Elite. Another cool one is charting.

Before we start here, I recommend you to use some Finviz Elite settings, that will make life easier for you.

For me, the following settings are the best ones:

Just go to “info” in the upper right, hit “settings,” and there you go.

I changed the minimal average volume to 100,000 and minimal price to $1.

That’s because I never care about penny stocks below $1 and stocks with nearly no volume since those usually have high spreads.

Also, I like to use 100 table rows (instead of 20 standard), 60 charts rows, and 50 snapshot rows.

The advanced chart settings are active with Yes.

I like financial visualizations, and I like the way of scanning charts on a visual way at a glance.

For example:

When I want to see if earnings had a good impact on the long side and I am looking for consolidation for entry into the trend direction, then I can use two simple filters like

• Exchange = Nasdaq
• Eearnings Date = Previous 5 Days

In my example, I have 24 results, and because of the settings, I can scroll down through all charts on this one results page.

My eyes are trained to identify the pattern I am looking for.

And even an untrained eye would recognize, which stocks show a good consolidations structure after a sharp up-move and which don’t.

It took me about 10 seconds to identify two stocks out of 24 worth watching at in more detail.

From here, I can start my more in-depth analyzation with drawing tools and time frame analysis in charts. I can also save the stock ticker in one of my portfolios or create a price alert.

Finviz Premarket

With Finviz Elite, you have access to premarket data and you can scan over 8,000 stocks before the market open based on your favorite criteria.

I use the following Finviz settings to scan for gaps in premarket:

• Go to screener
• Chose “technical”
• Sort by column “GAP”
• Set “Auto Refresh” to 10s

I filter it down more, but I don’t like to limit you down to much here. Now you have a Finviz Gap screener that refreshes all 10 seconds during premarket in real-time!

That’s amazingly simple for just ~$25 per month inclusive market-data feed costs.

My preference is to add other filters like “volume” and “price” to filter out the noise.

Just play around a bit, and after a few minutes, you will have understood entirely how Finviz premarket scans work.

Best Finviz Screener Settings

The best Finviz screener settings are relative by definition. As I have shown you above, here are my favorite settings:

For me, those settings reflect the best ones based on my current trading style.

If you are using Finviz Elite, or if you have registered for the free Finviz screener version, then you should definitely play around with these settings.

Without registration, you are not able to configure those Finviz screener settings.

Best Finviz Scans

Here are some type of Finviz scans I use frequently.

Finviz Breakout Scan

A breakout is more of a technical analysis based type of event.

However, you can use it also for a Finviz breakout scan.

Looking for long-setups, you can use the following scanner settings:

• Performance: Week Up
• 20-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA
• 50-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA
• 200-Day Simple Moving Average: Price above SMA
• Change: Up
• Relative Volume: Over 1
• Gap: Up 3%
• Change from Open: Up

Now I save the screener presets as described above in this guide and have it ready anytime, anywhere:

The only thing I have to do now is to select this preset scanner, and I see the results. Today, the results spit out six stocks. AVDL, DTEA, GCAP, KZIA, NVLN, and ROAD.

And all of them had strong breakout days. For example; AVDL: