Google stock screener

Google Finance has launched a stock
screener that allows the user to screen stocks based on several
criteria including a number of balance sheet and profitability
variables, several valuation metrics as well as variables related to
stock price performance. This tool makes possible a variety of
analyses that could earlier be done only by those with an expensive
Bloomberg or Reuters terminal. However, the universe is limited to
about four thousand stocks which is much less than you would get if
you subscribe to one of the commercial services.

For example, one can list
the stocks with a market capitalization of more than a billion dollars
that have a negative beta. There are fifteen of them, but several
are bond funds or ETFs.

It is also interesting to just list the tops
stocks by market capitalization and observe that three of the top
five stocks are from China and Brazil.

I wish they would also allow screening by industry and
geography. The query string in the URL clearly shows that sector and
exchange are potential search fields, but these do not appear to be
enabled as of now.