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Post by Fletchsmile on Jan 26, 2016 14:17:18 GMT 7
Hargreaves Lansdown have just introduced a nice basic stock screener. Covers: shares, bonds, funds, ETFs, investment trusts Previously I tended to use Digital Look for UK and some European shares, and Trustnet for funds/ investment trusts Just did a quick try on Investments trusts, and seems easy to use for basic parameters, eg sector, premium/ discount, ongoing charge, performance etc. eg did Europe + discount 20% to 10% premium + div yield > 3% as parameters. There's than advanced search where you can set more parameters Similarly for UK shares Looks like it could help quickly narrow down searches for further analysis.. www.hl.co.uk/stockscreener |
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AyG
Crazy Mango Extraordinaire
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Post by AyG on Jan 26, 2016 14:36:10 GMT 7
Thanks. Hadn't come across that before. However, I'm not sure I'm impressed. My "go to" screener is Morningstar. I find it extremely helpful to have their star ratings which help me build a short list for further investigations. Whilst HL have their list of preferred funds, they don't do anything similar for investment trusts. The HL preferred funds list is also very suspect. They include funds that have a poor performance record, and exclude well performing funds because they have been asked to by the fund management company due to capacity issues.
The sectors are also not particularly detailed. Far too much is dumped in "specialist".
Finally, it doesn't cover offshore funds based in, say Ireland. But then, I guess HL doesn't sell them, so it's not in their commercial interests to do so.
Still, an interesting addition. I wonder where they're buying their data from. Not immediately obvious (to me, at least).
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Post by Fletchsmile on Jan 27, 2016 11:22:25 GMT 7
I use Morningstar occasionally - and am more likely to use for Thailand where there's less alternatives. The star rating can be useful as one of many criteria, but their ratings aren't a primary screening/search criteria for me. It's one of the things I look at towards the end.
There's some good info on Morningstar, but as a screener for UK, I find it fiddly. The choice of parameters is also very basic. For investment trusts, this new HL one and Trustnet have more parameters to choose in screening and address some of the shortfalls on Morninstar.
As examples, Morningstar doesn't let you sort multiple sectors at the same time, eg Europe, US, UK is 3 separate searches. Can't even do Europe and Europe EM, Europe smaller companies together like Trustnet. Doesn't let you screen on premiums/ discounts - an essential consideration for ITs. Can't screen by yields and so on.
Info per screen is also limited, particularly the snapshots. Trustnet does a great job of getting much more info into the same page. Morningstar has info but the presentation is poor, and a bit old fashioned. Although a decent breakdown when you click on the individual fund, it's just time consuming to plough thru.
I find myself having to click on all the individual funds one by one to get what I really want. That's not what a screener's for.
The choice of parameters simultaneously on HL is one of the widest I've seen for a screener.
For HL's preferred fund list, you're right they don't do for ITs. For unit trusts I find their Wealth 150, Wealth 150+, Core trackers etc useful. Again though it's just one factor. I disagree with some of them like I do for Morningstar. The Wealth 150 is for available funds. So no point listing funds you can't buy that have been soft closed in UK.
This is where the screener can come in to compliment the preferred list. They can be used separately or combined. The screener let's you pick whether you want to use their preferred lists as a screener parameter or not.
Offshore is an option, and is under "sector" on the advanced menu.
So you could do a search for say: offshore funds + Europe + European Smaller + Europe EM + yield >3% + income units + TER <1.5% + semi-annual or annual distribution + full saving on initial charge etc etc
To get that on most websites I'd be clicking on each individual fund, not on a single screening attempt
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AyG
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Post by AyG on Jan 27, 2016 11:50:49 GMT 7
So you could do a search for say: offshore funds + Europe + European Smaller + Europe EM + yield >3% + income units + TER <1.5% + semi-annual or annual distribution + full saving on initial charge etc etc Is that the sort of query you might realistically make? Bestinvest had a similar style filter, but I never saw any need to use any of its advanced features. Incidentally, it appears that Bestinvest has updated their screener recently. I guess the industry has raised their game. It's at select.bestinvest.co.uk/InvestmentSelector Still, definitely more basic than the HL one. I can see that for HL clients it's nice to have their charges spelled out. For me it involves going to each of my accounts and looking up what the account provider charges. (With Transact it's particularly confusing because the "clean" fund classes are often more expensive than the dirty ones.) Still, at least Transact now displays the charges. Until recently only financial advisers could see them, so I had to send a message asking for the charges of each of the classes of every fund I was interested in and then wait for a reply - a ludicrous situation.) |
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Post by Fletchsmile on Jan 27, 2016 12:20:26 GMT 7
A lot of the parameters I probably wouldn't use as you say. I do have specific things in mind sometimes when I'm looking. That search was one I did recently (excluding the offshore bit - I only added it today out of curiousity as I'm indifferent on that if in UK).
I was looking for European based funds from all 3 European categories, yielding over 3 %, distributing the income, and with not too high TER and initial charge discounted to zero.
Then looked at similar for European ITs. In that case the initial charge parameter goes, but I'm reluctant to buy at a premium so put that in instead
The nice thing is that the parameters you've selected come up as fields in the customised table returned so you can directly compare on a single screen at high level
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