Go to Scrab

Suppose you've already set up your criteria and run the screener. You have a list of 2000 companies as a result that looks like this: 

While it’s still manageable to analyse 2,000 companies, it would be much easier if you could temporarily narrow these results even further to focus on, say, the top 10 or 100 companies. 

One way of doing it is to click on the column header in the table to sort out the companies by one of the criteria. Nevertheless, it would work only if just one criterion is essential to you – for example, if you’d like to see the top 30 companies with the lowest Debt to Assets ratio. But what if the company with the lowest Debt to Assets ratio unfortunately also has a really poor Current Ratio score?

Filtering out the results gives you a powerful way to deal with multiple criteria and many conditions. 

Click on the "Filter" icon to open the tool and add at least one condition:

As an example, let's narrow our displayed results to companies with both Debt to Assets lower than 30 and a Current Ratio higher than 1.5:

As a result, our list of 2000 companies found previously in the screener, is now reduced by half:

If you want, you can tighten the criteria even more or relax them by applying less strict rules.

You can also change the logical operator AND to OR (just click on it), for example:

In that case, the system filters out the results so you can see only companies with Debt to Assets less than 30 or a Current Ratio higher than 1.5.

The apparent effect of the relaxed condition is that more companies are displayed as a result:

Advanced uses of filters

By clicking the indention marks (>) on the right side of the filter conditions, you can group the criteria to build advanced, sophisticated multi-level dependencies like this:

The main idea in this example is to treat companies from different sectors in slightly different ways. Debt to Assets at the level of 40% for industrial companies is pretty standard, so we don't want to be too strict here. On the other hand, 40% Debt to Assets for technology companies might often be unjustified. So, based on that, we want to treat the debt level differently in both cases.

To do this, we can use the filter tool as in the example above. This is what has happened here:

  1. First, we have grouped two different conditions using the logical operator AND. This combination means we want the filter tool to show us companies with Debt to Assets lower than 30%, but only (AND) if the second condition is met (the company belongs to the Technology Sector).
  2. The second group of conditions allows for the companies with higher debt levels, but only (AND) if they belong to Industrial Sector since it might be justified for them to have a slightly higher debt load.
  3. We have used the OR separator here to allow for either Group One or Group Two companies to be displayed since both combo conditions couldn't be met simultaneously. The same company cannot belong to the Industrial and Technology Sector at the same time. If we used the AND operator here, the result would be zero companies meeting the criteria. 

As you can see, you can use the filter tool to achieve many different goals, and your imagination is the only thing that limits you. Feel free to experiment on your own to better understand the infinite possibilities.