By: Alexander Voigt
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How to Use Finviz – The Step-By-Step Guide

This guide will answer your question on How to use Finviz. I will tell you all about best Finviz scanner settings and show you some sneaky little tricks to make the most out of this powerful stock screener.

So, how to use Finviz? Let’s start with some functionalities available for free.

Finviz

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.

Here is the Finviz comparison chart:

Finviz costs and pricing

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.

how to use the Finviz stock screener

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
Finviz scanner settings and filters

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.”

Finviz filters

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”:

Finviz interactive chart

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.

Finviz screener presets

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

Finviz custom configuration

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 – at least once you noticed the correct strings for each filter.

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.”

Finviz small cap stocks scan

Otherwise, all your screener presets get lost.

So what’s the benefit?

Well, have a look:

Finviz stock screener scan settings

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.

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.

Finviz scan results

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:

Finviz scraping

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
Finviz data export

Now, chose all the criteria you want:

Finviz export criteria

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:

Finviz to Excel export

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:

Finviz data export

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:

Finviz screener settings

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), 50 charts rows, and 50 snapshot rows.

The advanced chart settings are active as well as the default chat type “interactive.”

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

For example:

Finviz realtime charts

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.

One of those two stocks was HHR. I click on the mini chart and because of my preset for “interactive charts” the following chart will appear:

Finviz interactive charting

From here, I can start my more in-depth analyzation. I can use the drawing tools. I can change the time frames and chart type.

I can also save the stock ticker in one of my portfolios or create a price alert.

Finviz Elite makes things that much easier!

Finviz Premarket

Finviz Elite users have access to premarket data. This way, you can scan a few thousand stocks before the market open based on your criteria.

Finviz premarket real time data

For example, you can setup a simple gap-up Finviz scanner.

A bit later in this How to use Finviz guide, I will show you a more complex scan that included the gap-up filter.

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:

Finviz screener 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

Defining “the best scans” is quite relative as it depends on the trader’s preferred strategy.

However, the good thing is that Finviz provides you with the freedom to experiment with a wide variety of scans to help you find the best investing opportunities.

Here are some possible scans that you can start with:

Finviz Breakout Scan

Most of Finivz’ filters are based on fundamental data. 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:

Finviz breakout scan
  • 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:

Finviz breakout scan settings

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:

Finviz breakout chart

Anyway, Finviz is strong and has tons of functionalities. But the available filters are limited. I also use Trade Ideas, my favorite day-trading stock screener.

They have a few hundreds of filters for thousands of filter combinations. Also, there are various pre-configured breakout-scanners available.

How to Use Finviz? My Conclusion

Finviz is an affordable and very powerful stock screener. By using Finviz, traders will identify the right stocks to trade based on the filters chosen.

One of the biggest Finviz advantages is the speed of the platform. First of all, it is completely web-based, and all results appear in under one second. That’s amazingly fast.

Registering for the free Finviz version unlocks plenty of features like customized layouts, portfolio builder, screener presets, etc.

So, in a nutshell – if you learn how to use Finviz, you will improve your performance massively and take advantage of a powerful assistant entirely for free!

The free Finviz version is a great starting point for swing traders and position traders.

With ~$25 per month, Finviz Elite is an excellent choice for those who are looking for real-time prices, more functionalities like data exports and extensive charting capabilities.

Thanks to all the features and functionalities of the web-based platform, individuals can take advantage of:

  • Real-time quotes
  • Interactive charts
  • Market maps
  • Futures, Forex, and Cryptocurrencies

Also, a great backtest-engine is part of Finviz Elite.

Day traders might need even more power since besides real-time data, more scanner settings are useful.

So if you are looking for the best stock screening solution for day trading, then you should go with Trade Ideas A.I. Pro.

They have a few hundred filters and alerts, pre-configured scans, artificial intelligence-based signals, pre- and after-hours scans, and much more from everything.

Check out Trade-Ideas.com to learn more about the ultimate power of the #1 stock screener and one of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.

Alexander Voigt, CEO
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Alexander Voigt is the founder of DayTradingZ, was a regular contributor to Benzinga and has been featured and quoted on leading financial websites such as Investors.com, Capital.com, Business Insider and Forbes.