Uncle Stock Screener Review
In my opinion, stock screeners are the most valuable resources for every long-term investor and short-term trader. Without a stock screener, you would need days to analyze and compare various companies regarding their major key numbers like earnings per share, price, traded volume, value models, scoring models, etc.
With a stock screener, you can do this with a few mouse clicks within minutes. In my comprehensive report about the best stock screener, I have already analyzed over 40 different products. Recently I became aware of another exciting stock screener – the Uncle Stock fundamental stock screener.
To get in-depth insights into the core functionalities of this screener, I asked the founder, Peter Nees, to explain his product to us.
I am pleased that Peter does not only provide insights into Uncle Stock but also answering some personal questions about his career, investments, and plans.
What is Uncle Stock?
Uncle Stock is a big calculator that starts from the company’s financial and stock price measures, to calculate a lot of indicators that determine how good a company is, what it’s worth and how this value relates to the current stock price.
Uncle Stock is a niche product that differentiates from its bigger competitors by depth of analysis, market coverage, integrated backtest and product price.
The software is completely created by Peter Nees. It started small, and Peter created the software initially to support his own investments. He kept improving the software over the years, letting the software evolve gradually, listening well to user feedback.
Peter always tries to keep the personal touch. Last year, Peter got support from his son, Alexander Nees, who studied economics/finance.
Features
Indicators
Unique about Uncle Stock is that each of its 450 core metrics has also a lot of derived metrics, like averages, growth, CAGRs and statistical indicators, .. which brings the total amount of metrics to over 6,000 per stock – all historical. Uncle Stock provides financial results from 1994 and indicators from 2000.
This makes the amount of data points provided by Uncle Stock immense. Also, most indicators can be benchmarked with the industry median.
Concretely, Uncle Stock has 450 core metrics organized in following groups:
- Scores
- Stock price and technical metrics
- Company value
- Intrinsic value based valuation ratios
- Yield based valuation ratios
- Balance based valuation ratios
- Investment based profitability ratios
- Sales based profitability ratios
- Quality of earnings
- Liquidity ratios
- Solvency ratios
- Shares
- Income, Balance and Cash flow statement
An overview of the core metrics with explanation can be found here:
https://unclestock.com/documentation/ratios.html
Stock Screener
Uncle Stock allows to screen on most of these metrics. Users can backtest their queries, refine them to optimize their strategy and save them for later usage. They can also share them to the other users.
Users can use or start from screens created by other users or predefined screens inspired by investment gurus like Buffett, Greenblatt, Lynch and Piotroski.
Backtesting
Uncle Stock has a very solid integrated backtest function. Users can backtest their screens from 2008, creating a hypothetical portfolio by taking the best stocks according to the screen. After the backtest, users know the historical yearly return of several trading strategies that are based on the screen.
So it’s a perfect way to know how good your strategy is expected to work. The backtest result also tells the deviation of the result, giving an idea of how predictable the strategy is.The backtest is integrated in the screener and can be done with a single click. This is an incredible important tool for an investor.
Charts
Uncle Stock is not a charting tool. It shows a basic evolution chart of all metrics, and has incorporated external chart tools for technical analysis for US and Canada).
Markets
One of the main goals of Uncle Stock is to allow users to look beyond the classic North American and European markets. Today, the tool has 74.000 stocks, covering 91 markets in 51 countries.
News
Uncle Stock aggregates news and articles from Yahoo Finance and Seeking Alpha at the level of a stock, a watch list or a search result.
Mobile Usability
Uncle Stock is mainly built to be used on a laptop/PC, but can be used as well on tablets and smartphones. There is no App, but the application is responsive (adapts automatically to the used device). However, a powerful device is required as the application has a lot of logic running on the client.
Export to Excel
It is possible to extract all metrics from a stock, a watchlist or a search result to Excel. However, there are some limits here on the number of stocks exported as it is not the intention to export the complete database to Excel.
Plans | Costs | Pricing
Uncle Stock has three possible subscription packages increasing in features and price: Copper, Bronze, Silver and Gold. Without any subscription it is already possible to see financial metrics, price information, news and charts.
Copper gives you a quick check service of some scores, advice and price target. Bronze is the basic screener including a lot of the tool’s strengths like the variety of financial information and global coverage. Bronze it is perfect to find a stock and analyze it deeply.
The largest incentive to take the Silver option is possibility to optimize your strategy using the integrated backtest. Also your user experience improves as saving queries, a personalized view and recalculating scores are possible now.
The Gold package gives no limitations. An important addition is benchmarking the financials with their industry median. Moreover, gold allows an export to Microsoft Excel, has multiple views and watchlists, introduces some lightweight portfolio management.
Click on the picture or check the Uncle Stock website for more information:
https://www.unclestock.com/en/subscribe.html
Free Trial | Promo Code
Uncle Stock offers 2 week free trial. No obligation. No need to cancel.
Provider Checklist
- Founded: 2011, commercial from 2016.
- Company address check: Della Faillelaan 11, 2290 Vorselaar, Belgium
- Free trial: 14-day free trial
- Free resources: Price information, charts, news and financial results. blog.unclestock.com.
- Price range: $9-$28 per month
Who Is Uncle Stock Best For?
Uncle Stock is a tool for value and growth investors. But there is not such thing as a typical Uncle Stock user.
It ranges from young students or grads in finance to older retirees, from normal people with practically no investing experience to experts and financial advisors. If there is one thing that’s common, it’s their willingness to work thoroughly.
Questions To The Founder, Peter Nees
Please, tell us a bit about yourself
I like to play table tennis! [laughs] I have a background in software engineering. I started developing Uncle Stock not only to support my own investments, but also to learn Java, and because of the fun of the creating something.
At that time, I almost had no knowledge of investing, and knew only about two ratios: Price-earnings and price-book value, of which I read in a book for beginners.
Over the years, I learned a bit more about financial metrics. [smiles] Besides reading on the Internet, I learned most from my users. My users are often a lot more knowledgeable as I am on financials and investing.
You know, it is so true what Bill Gates says: “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” That’s exactly what I did. I listened to their feedback, their ideas and yes, their complaints and I learned and adapted. I still do that.
What is your investment philosophy?
I try to be a long term value investor, mainly following the philosophy of Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, … I look for financially and businesswise healthy companies that are undervalued by the market and hold them over the long term.
I think that it is possible to beat the market by having patience as highly leveraged institutions have to exit great opportunities because they do not want to keep up their short term results. I must say this looks so easy on paper, but is not in reality.
What are your main investments?
My largest current investment in a company is Foot Locker. At the end of 2017, the stock price dropped strongly due to weaker financial results and increasing competition from Amazon. This made Foot Locker extremely cheap.
I think the hype of Amazon lead to the undervaluation of the “boring” Foot Locker. It has a very strong balance sheet with loads of cash and a good management. My second largest position is in Audi and I own some mining stocks, like Centamin Plc and Silvercorp Metals.
If the current stock market dip continues, I will start buying shares of Apple or Facebook at a discount.
What tips do you have for others who want to grow their income?
I would give the following tips to beginning investors:
- Start with readingsome good books. (Lynch, Graham, Greenblatt, …) and keep reading.
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Be wise. Smart asset allocation is the most important. Invest a significant part of your savings into stocks, and, if possible, diversify with physical things as a house, gold, ..If you don’t want to spend effort on stock analysis: buy some ETFs. Nothing wrong with that..
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Be careful. Don’t overestimate yourself, be modest. Realize you can be wrong. Be aware of risks. Avoid testosteron: most returns come from boring stocks. Don’t gamble. Don’t speculate.
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Think for yourself. Ignore social media. They can make you crazy or at least put you on the wrong foot. Be extremely careful with following tips and taking advice from periodicals. Think for yourself. Do your homework. Use a good fundamental stock screener to support you.
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And be strong. Don’t get too disappointed from making mistakes. Believe me, I know. Experience comes only from mistakes. But prevent to lose too much on them.
What are your plans for the future regarding Uncle Stock?
It’s time to grow, get more users. So I need to start investing in marketing. I did not do that up to now, as I counted on organic growth. After significant growth, I can scale-up, diversify and deepen the product.
Uncle Stock Review Summary
First of all I would like to thank Peter, for sharing such extensive information with us. Above all, I am glad that you took the time to answer a few personal questions. I also made a closer look at the Uncle Stock Screener and find it beneficial.
Admittedly, this stock screener is not suitable for day traders. The niche is, as Peter already said, instead meant for fundamentally acting traders.
Moreover, Uncle Stock differs from the competition with an excellent price model and the depth of analysis, market coverage, and the integrated backtest module. I particularly like the fact that there is a 14-day free trial version.
Rating
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