Screen Your Way to Investment Gains

Where do you get your investment ideas? With thousands of stocks out there, weeding out the noise can be a time consuming process.

That's where stock screeners come in. Here's everything you need to know to score gains with stock screeners.

Screener Basics

Essentially, stock screeners are programs that look through a list of stocks and find the investments that meet your criteria. If you're looking for small-cap investments, for example, you could tell your screener to only show you stocks with market caps of $2 billion or less.

Inside the screener is a database of stock metrics, such as like the P/E of IBM(IBM Quote) (it's 9.76, in case you were wondering) or General Electric(GE Quote)'s net income last year ($4.3 billion). When you input criteria, or "screens," the program uses its database of metrics to decide what to show you and what to skip over.

Stock screeners may sound like a high-priced investment tool, but they're not. In fact, there are a ton of free stock screeners on the internet that do a terrific job of sifting through investment options. Google Finance has one, Yahoo! Finance has one, so does Morningstar, and, of course, TheStreet.com has a free stock screener, too.

Free isn't the only way to go for stock screeners, and there are scores of premium stock screeners out there that offer expanded features for a monthly fee. The question is whether or not it's worth shelling out the cash for a premium screener when there are so many freebies available online.