FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — The amount of information available from the world’s financial markets is growing in size on a daily basis, and with it, the ability to assess what it all means is an ever-growing challenge for investors.
Today, more than ever, investors are effectively looking for the signal from the noise. The rise of market data screening tools has been a direct result of the need to present the information analysis in a way that is quickly digestible, making it easier to detect the patterns and information that matter. Atlantis Data Solutions represents the broader trend of information-first decision-making becoming the new best practice for investors looking to outperform financial markets, and an interactive stock screener allows market participants to take in the relevant information in a visual, rather than static or superficial, format.
Access Large Datasets Easily and Quickly
A stock market can contain thousands of different companies, with each providing an ongoing stream of new financial and market data. This is clearly too much to analyse manually. Screening is the process of filtering information, in this case, investment opportunities, based on criteria. This can include market capitalisation, valuation multiples, top-line growth rates, trading volume, or a company’s change in share price over time.
There is an obvious benefit to ‘screening out’ the noise and turning a large dataset of securities into a smaller, more manageable investment universe. It’s important to realise that this does not automatically generate an investment opportunity for an investor.
A More Effective Way to Analyse Markets
The traditional approach of scrolling through rows of figures in a spreadsheet still holds value, but it can be highly challenging to draw conclusions from this method when you’re looking at this many numbers at the same time. A visual stock screener uses colour-coded data points based on the values of set screening criteria, charts, and graphs to allow users to see what happens when the data is displayed visually and the relationships between different data points are analysed.
The Quicker Route to Better Screening Results
The adage is true: when screening, it’s vital to keep it simple, stupid. This means an investor should have a pretty solid idea of what they are looking for, whether that be large, established companies with stable financials, growing companies, or companies offering certain expected payout or market-movement characteristics.
Criteria should then be applied against the investment universe in an appropriate manner. Having too many different conditions can rule out too many companies that could be investible, and a failure to implement a sufficient number of conditional rules will lead to a screen consisting of thousands of different potential investment opportunities.
Structured + Context = Better Decisions
Using visualization to break down and explore market data is a great step toward understanding, but the quality of any analysis ultimately depends on how one thinks about the data itself. An almost comically low multiple valuation, a superhuman growth story, or a lightning bolt in a volume chart can often be contextualized in any number of ways.
Certainly, the best approach to any problem is that which marries structure to context, but at least while the universe of structured data expands, the analytical ability to filter, dissect, and engage the information will likely represent an ever-greater portion of effective market intuition.
