Think: spaghetti. In a strainer. Now hold up a prism to your eye and look at the noodles. You only want the pinkish ones. Shake the strainer around. Pick out the pinkish ones. Those are the only noodles you care about.
Ok, now to the stock screener. It searches “all public companies” on a database that has dozens of columns with data applied to each stock, from its ticker to its revenues to its dividend or yield, and market cap or value. So let’s say you only want to look at stocks with yield above 3.5% and below 4.5%. And you only want stocks in this frame which trade over a million shares a day, or $50 million in value a day. And exist in the S&P 500 index. So you screen, shaking the electronic screener, and you come up with 28 stocks. Now you have a list small enough you can actually cream-skim, and think through the value proposition of owning it. Or not.
