What Is the Best Stock Screener for Day Trading in 2024?

Finding Stocks for Day Trading with Screeners in 2024

A stock screener helps day traders look for stocks to trade. It takes the fire hose of information from thousands of tickers to a manageable handful of stocks primed to move or that meet your criteria for a possible trade.

Something I’ve learned in my 20 years plus of day trading: you can’t be inefficient. Taking too much time doing stock research might mean missing out on great potential trades. That is why a stock screener (and stock scanner) is so critical for day trading.

What are the best stock screeners for day trading, and why are they the best?

What Is Day Trading?

Day trading is when you buy and sell securities (usually stocks) within the same day. This trading strategy often relies on technical analysis or news catalysts to profit from small price swings. Pretty self-explanatory, I know.

As you also know day trading can lead to substantial losses, but can also be source of great consistent income if disciplined and not greedy.

What Is a Stock Screener for Day Trading?

A stock screener for day trading is a screener platform that helps you find stocks to day trade. Stock screeners for day trading usually have a variety of analysis capabilities.

Different stock screeners have different strengths. Check out our other on the best overall stock screeners and the best stock screeners for swing trading.

Importance of Using a Stock Screener for Day Trading

There’s no way you can go through the 15,000 publicly traded stocks in the U.S. by yourself. A stock screener imoroves not only your response time, but your awareness; helping you spot opportunities and capitalize faster.

To day trade successfully, you’ll need access to the most current market data. The best way to track these moves in more than one or two stocks is through a stock screener.

Day trading stock screeners rely on versatile technical criteria. Meanwhile, swing traders and investors need screeners with strong momentum analysis capabilities potentially with fundamental analysis.

Why Do You Need a Day Trading Stock Screener?

You need a day trading stock scanner because it’s essential for trading. Top traders are constantly keeping tabs on the stocks that are moving in the market and regardless of the number of charts you have or screens you cannot watch it all.

Know how they do that? They use stock screeners — very often.

The best day trading screeners are highly customizable, fast and serve a particular purpose. You can tweak their features to suit your trading strategies and needs. You can even get scans frequently used by other traders — meaning you have the tools that experienced traders use.

Take Mometic's MOMO Pro, for example. It has trader-designed scans, so you can look for the biggest dollar gainers and biggest percent gainers. You can even drill down further and see which stocks are the biggest dollar or percent gainers over a certain period. Add in Float, ATR, MOMO Squeeze, MOMO Trend and other indicators and you can start finding your best setups.

MOMO Pro in offers a beautiful screener experience and data visualizations, pre-made screens, and a instant news scanner. Take it for a free trial — sign up today.

Advantages of Day Trading Stock Screeners

The main advantage of day trading stock screeners is increased response time. The best day trading stock screeners let you save multiple watchlists, so you can keep an eye on lots of tickers at once.

Another advantage of day trading stock scanning tools is that you can trade directly from the chart. This cuts down even more time between spotting a trading opportunity and making a trade.

How to Use a Stock Screener for Day Trading

Different screeners cater to different kinds of stock traders, so how I use it might differ from how you use it. You’ll find a screening method that works for you.

But here’s a quick rundown of the basic process a day trader might use to find the stocks they want to trade:

List the top daily gainers. Most of these stocks recently made noticeable upward price movements, meaning the market is getting excited about them. Make sure there’s real demand driving these price increases, as shown by unusual volume.

Assess if there is a gap. Use a gap filter to isolate those stocks with outsized enthusiasm. Combine with float or unusual volume to refine as needed. You can even select if recent news has had potential reason for the move.

Look at the catalyst. Is it a real piece of news — or a social media pump?

Make a watchlist. Most good day trading screeners will allow you to build custom watchlists.

Build your trading plan. Day traders usually trade from price action. Look at pre-market highs and lows for good entry points, goals, and risk to inform your trade.

Stay ready. Alerts are a good way to keep tabs on a potential trade setting up. Your stock screener should have easy to set price alerts.

Stock Screener Settings for Day Trading

Everyone’s got different trading plans and preferences, so that means everyone has different stock screener settings. Some people might set their stock screener to find top gainers. When you’ve traded stocks as long as I have, you’ll know what kinds of setup works and what doesn’t.

If you’re just starting out, I’ll direct you in the right direction. Here are two setups of screening criteria I’ve used for years. I’ve been running these two scans every day with some slight variations when looking for stocks to trade. You can replicate these filter criteria on any stock scanner.

Let’s take a look at my two example setups:

Top percent gainer scan: In this one, I look for prices between $0.40 and $25, trading more than 250,000 volume on the day, and up more than 5% on the day.

Low-float news scan: In this scan, I look for stocks with a float under 10 million, with news catalysts in the past 6 hours and prices up more than 10% in past 5 minutes.

Once you run these scans, you’ll end up with a regular list of stocks. Do a bit of basic research, then put them on on your favorites watchlist or jump on it with a trade.

What Is the Best Stock Screener for Day Trading?

Every trader has different needs, so you’ll need to find one that fits your trading strategies and goals.

The hard work here is figuring out which scanner works the best for you from all the available choices.

How do you find the screener that works for you? We’ll cover that in the next section…

How We Evaluated These Best Stock Screeners for Day Trading

There are a variety of stock screeners for day trading out there — and not all of them are good. Here are the best stock screener criteria for day trading:

• Pricing: Most of the best day trading stock screeners are paid products. Find one that suits your budget but still gives you the features you need. MOMO Pro shines here. With 3 different plans with Pro+ at $37/mo. You get realtime scanning and screening with News as well as MOMO Flow; our one of a kind unusual volume scanner for 1 and 5 min timeframes.

• Data Timeliness: Some stock screeners update quotes on a delay — this makes them unusable and largely untrustworthy for day traders. Find a screener that gives you timely data updates, so you can stay on top of the market.

• Customizability: A stock screener is only as good as its indicators. Your stock screener should be customizable according to your needs. Innovative capabilities such as multi-screen and mobile support.

The above three points aren’t the only criteria I use. Learn what other criteria I used in my article on the best stock screener criteria.

Be sure to include your own stock screener criteria for day trading if you’re making your own list of picks.

Best Day Trading Stock Screeners

Here are my picks for the best day trading stock screeners:

MOMO Pro+ — Best Overall Day Trading Stock Screener

Scanz — Best Customizable Day Trading Stock Screener

Yahoo Finance — Best Free Day Trading Stock Screener

ChartMill — Most Versatile Stock Screener for Day Trading

Trade Ideas — Traditional "Old School" Day Trading Stock Screener

Try them all! One should fit your budget and trading style.

My first day trading stock screener pick is MOMO Pro. If that seems peculiar or biased, well it should be. Unfortunately, these type of posts are rife as SEO click bait. On any given day you will see many others with supposed independent posts about the best scanners and such simply to mislead or exhaust your well intentioned research efforts. It's not really our style, but we need to keep our name out there. You will also find entire sites pumping reviews with affiliate links so stay weary and wealthy during your search.

Regardless, we (makers of MOMO Pro) are the fastest scanner and screener on the market. The others have their strengths but if you are a day trader or scalper we are hard to beat.

I personally make 30 or more trades a day. Whether quick scalps or adjusting swing sizes and I use MOMO Pro every day.

Hope you can forgive us for these Google search games and if you want to try MOMO Pro, you can get started here. We promise not to spam the internet with this type of fodder as we don't have the time, nor the stomach.

Don't have MOMO Pro yet? Get started here!

Michael @ Mometic