Guru Stock Screen of the Week: The Top Momentum Plays in Today's Market

This week, we bring you the Stock Screen of the week from Validea. On Validea.com, you can screen for stocks using the site’s Guru Stock Screener, which scores stocks based on the fundamental stock selection criteria of legendary investors. The firm’s models are based on investing legends such as Warren Buffett, Peter Lynch, Benjamin Graham, Kenneth Fisher, Martin Zweig, David Dreman, Joel Greenblatt and others.

This week’s screen is based on Validea’s Momentum strategy, which looks for companies with strong price momentum and EPS growth that is coupled with high return on equity and falling debt. This is a robust screen and the criteria are outlined below. To further refine the screen, we filter out companies with market caps below $300 million.

  1. THIS QUARTER VS. SAME QUARTER LAST YEAR
  2. ANNUAL EARNINGS GROWTH
  3. EARNINGS CONSISTENCY
  4. LONG-TERM EPS GROWTH RATE RELATIVE TO GROWTH IN THE LATEST 2 QUARTERS
  5. CURRENT PRICE LEVEL
  6. 4 MONTH S&P RELATIVE STRENGTH LINE
  7. PRICE PERFORMANCE COMPARED TO ALL OTHER STOCKS
  8. CONFIRM AT LEAST ONE OTHER LEADING STOCK IN THE INDUSTRY
  9. LOOK FOR LEADING INDUSTRIES
  10. DECREASING LONG-TERM DEBT/EQUITY
  11. RETURN ON EQUITY
  12. SHARES OUTSTANDING
  13. INSIDER OWNERSHIP
  14. INSTITUTIONAL OWNERSHIP

 

To view the Momentum Investor portfolio on Validea, click here

All of the stocks in the table below meet at least 80% of the criteria listed above. The stocks that made the cut were further sorted by the total number of guru models, indicating that these names passed the Momentum Investor model as well as one or many other models found on Validea. It’s important to note that while strong price momentum can be a good predictor of short to mid-term price performance, stocks with high momentum can often times display more volatility than the average stock in the market.

momo list