Tutorial: find your first stock with the screener

A screener does not tell you what to buy. Everyone has one, they all run on the same public data, and anything a screen can see is already in the price. What it does brilliantly is subtraction: it removes the companies you have no business looking at, so your limited attention lands somewhere useful.

Start with return on capital and moat score. High returns that persist are the fingerprint of a business that competitors cannot easily copy. Only once you have a list of good businesses does it make any sense to ask which are cheap.

Do it the other way round and you will produce a list of the cheapest companies in the market, which is a list of the ones the market has given up on, and it will usually be right.

Debt to equity, capped. This one filter removes most of the companies that will destroy you, because permanent loss almost always arrives through the balance sheet rather than the income statement.

A shortlist of forty is a shortlist you will never read. Sort by whatever you care about most, take the top six, and close the screener. The work is not the filtering. The work is the reading that comes next.