What Is Finviz?

Michael Whitman · Trading since 2017, full-time since 2020 · YouTube creator, 137K subscribers · Published 2026-09-15 · Updated 2026-09-22

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Video: Michael Whitman on YouTube, Finviz screener settings for swing trading. Watch it on YouTube.

Covered on this page: Finviz.

Finviz takes every listed US stock and lets you throw away the ones that do not meet your conditions. That is a smaller claim than most tools make and considerably more useful than most of them deliver.

How it works

It holds data on every US-listed company — price, volume, fundamentals, ownership, analyst figures, sector and industry.

You set conditions and it removes everything else. Market cap above a figure, average volume above a threshold, price above a moving average, a pattern the scanner recognizes.

Every filter is a statement about the past. “Price above the 200-day average” is a fact that has already happened — no filter predicts anything, and none claims to.

What it is genuinely good at

Replacing browsing with filtering. Without a screener you look at whatever crossed your feed; with one you look at everything meeting a condition you decided in advance.

The heat map. A single view of the whole market by sector and size, which answers “what is moving today” faster than any list.

And it is free for the parts that matter. The screener, the maps and the charts cost nothing; the paid tier adds real-time data, backtesting and more advanced filters.

A worked example

Start with roughly 8,000 US-listed tickers. Filter to market cap above 2 billion and average volume above a million shares, and a few thousand remain.

Add a technical condition — price above the 200-day average, say — and the list falls to a few hundred.

Add a second and you are at a few dozen. That is a list a person can actually read, which is the entire point of the exercise.

What you have is not a set of trades. It is a set of candidates that share properties you specified, and every one of them still needs looking at.

The free tier and what the paid one adds

Data is delayed on the free tier, typically by around fifteen minutes, which matters for intraday decisions and not at all for end-of-day screening.

The paid tier adds real-time quotes, more screener filters, backtesting and alerts. Whether that is worth a subscription depends on whether you trade intraday and whether you would actually use the extra filters.

Most people do not need it. Screening for swing or position setups happens outside market hours on data that does not need to be live.

And the honest test is usage. If you have not built a saved screen and run it regularly on the free version, paying for a better version of a tool you do not use is not going to change that.

The original data

Of the 24,971 trading and investing videos measured for this site, 79 have “finviz” in the title, from 47 channels, at a median of 6,340 views.

Those figures are the reason a screen is a starting point. A filter can tell you a stock closed above an average; it cannot tell you whether the next move persists. Even the S&P 500, which climbed across 1950 to 2026, closed higher on just 53.1% of its trading days.

And trading every name a screen returns is expensive. Every name bought and sold pays a spread and any commission, so a screen producing forty candidates a week produces forty ways to pay that before any of them is examined.

Building a screen that is worth running

Start with liquidity, always. Market cap and average volume filters remove the names where the spread will cost more than the idea is worth, and that single step improves most screens more than anything clever.

Use few conditions. Three or four filters produce a readable list; ten produce an empty one, or worse, a list of four names that happen to satisfy an over-specified description of the past.

Write down why each filter is there. A condition you cannot justify is a condition you added because it improved a historical result, which is fitting rather than screening.

And save it and run it on a schedule. The value of a screener is repetition — the same question asked every week — not a clever one-off query.

What the maps are actually showing

The heat map sizes each box by market capitalization and colors it by the day’s percentage move, so the biggest companies dominate the picture regardless of how much they moved.

Which makes it a map of where the index’s movement came from, not a map of which stocks moved most. A small company up 30% is a sliver; a giant up 1% is a wall.

The sector view aggregates that, and is the fastest way to see whether a day was broad or narrow - whether everything moved together or one group carried it.

Read it as attention rather than opportunity. It tells you what the market spent its day on, which is useful context and is not a list of things to trade.

How this connects

A screener sits between two other things. Upstream is the question you are asking; downstream is the chart you open. It replaces neither.

What you filter on comes from elsewhere. A filter on price above a moving average is only as useful as your understanding of what a moving average does, and a filter on relative strength assumes you know what relative strength measures. The screener applies the rule; it does not teach it.

The liquidity filters are the ones doing real work. Market cap and average volume are proxies for how wide the bid-ask spread will be and how much slippage you will pay, and those two costs decide whether a small edge survives at all.

Downstream, the output is a watchlist, not a trade. Each name still needs support and resistance marked, a market structure read, and a position size chosen before any of it becomes a decision.

And the fundamentals tab is a different timescale entirely. Revenue, margins and the debt ratio update quarterly, while the technical filters update every session - mixing them in one screen asks two questions at once.

What a heat map is actually measuring

Box size is market capitalization, color is the day’s percentage move. That pairing is the whole design, and it explains why the picture can feel wrong.

A giant moving 1% dominates the frame. A small company up 30% is a sliver you have to hunt for. So the map answers “where did the index’s movement come from”, not “what moved most today” - two different questions that look identical at a glance.

Sector blocks aggregate the same thing. They are the fastest way to see whether a session was broad or narrow: everything drifting together, or one group carrying the whole tape while the rest did nothing.

Which makes it a map of attention rather than opportunity. It tells you where the market spent its day. A stock being red says it fell; it does not say it is cheap, and the map contains nothing about why any box is the color it is.

Read it before the screener, not after. Knowing that energy carried the day tells you which screens are worth running, and that ordering is the only way the map changes a decision rather than just decorating one.

When it fails

The characteristic failure is adding filters until the list is short. Ten conditions produce five names, and five names feels like precision. What it actually is, is a description so specific that only a handful of stocks have ever matched it — the filters were tightened because the list was long, not because each one earned its place. A screen built that way describes the past exactly and has no reason to describe next month.

A second failure is treating the output as trades. A shortlist is a research queue.

A third is screening without a liquidity filter, which fills the list with names too thin to trade.

A fourth is relying on delayed data for intraday decisions, where fifteen minutes is the whole move.

The question: Five names matched. Is that precision?

And a fifth is changing the screen every week. A screen you keep adjusting is a screen you are fitting to whatever just worked.

Related

Stock screener covers what screening does in general. TradingView covers the charting platform most people pair it with. And build a watchlist covers what to do with the shortlist a screen produces.

This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money. Some links on this page earn a commission if you buy through them. It costs you nothing and it does not decide what appears here or in what order — how these pages are made is set out in our methodology.