Stock Scanner - Market Mover

Review by eFreeware

If you are the sort of self-directed investor who spends the evening hunting through small caps rather than checking a retirement balance once a quarter, Stock Scanner is built for that routine. It is a free Android app in the finance category that combines a criteria-based stock screener with alerts, charts, news and a view of where large money is moving.

The appeal is the breadth of one app doing several jobs. Rather than switching between a screener, a chart viewer and a news feed, you get them in a single install that covers the NYSE, NASDAQ and OTC markets. What I like about the framing is that it treats scanning as a daily habit rather than a one-off search: you define what you are looking for, then let alerts and news bring candidates to you.

It is worth setting expectations early. This is a tool for people who already know roughly what a float, a short interest figure or an earnings date means, and who want to act on those numbers quickly. The developer also describes it as a way to learn how to scan for promising stocks, so a newcomer willing to read and experiment can grow into it, but the app assumes you bring your own strategy.

Who tends to get the most from it

The clearest fit is the active retail investor who follows smaller companies. Penny stocks and OTC listings sit alongside the major exchanges, and a penny stock scanner is one of the named tools. If your watchlist leans toward low-priced, thinly traded names where float size and short interest matter as much as the headline price, the criteria on offer line up with how you already think.

A second group is anyone who wants to keep an eye on exchange-traded funds without running a separate account or spreadsheet. Tracking favorite ETFs is one of the choices the screener supports, which suggests the same scanning framework covers both individual shares and funds. That is convenient if you hold a mix of both and want one place to check them.

The app also suits people who respond better to notifications than to charts. The alerter and the earnings calendar are designed to reach you rather than wait for you, which fits a working day where you cannot sit and watch the market. If your style is to check in at lunch and after the close, push alerts are the part that keeps you current.

Where it is less obviously aimed is at the long-term index investor who buys once a month and ignores the noise. Nothing here is built around that approach, and the emphasis on real-time movement, hot stocks and institutional activity points in a different direction.

The screener and its 93 criteria

The core of the app is a customizable stock screener built around 93 criteria. Those criteria span both technical and fundamental angles, with price, float shares and short interest among the examples. You set up your own scanner to surface candidates rather than working through a fixed list, which is the difference between a screening tool and a simple market list.

Coverage extends across the NYSE, NASDAQ and OTC markets, so the same scanner can be pointed at large, liquid names or at the over-the-counter end of the market. There is a dedicated penny stock scanner for the latter, which the developer presents as a way to specialize in that segment. For anyone who has tried to filter small caps by hand, having that as a named mode rather than a manual workaround is the practical draw.

The criteria are described as updating tick by tick in real time, which matters for a screener: a filter is only useful if the numbers behind it are current. The app also functions as a real-time stock tracker, so the same data feeds the scanning side and the monitoring side. I would expect that combination to be the reason most people install it.

Market mover, charts and backtesting

Alongside the screener, the app includes a smart market mover gauge that draws on real-time tracker information. The developer describes it as a way to judge when to invest, supported by what it calls alternative data for viewing the market differently. That is a bold claim, and how useful the gauge proves depends on how closely its signals match the way you already read the market.

Charts and tracker functions are free as well. These are tools for tracking a portfolio and for backtesting market strategies. Backtesting is the more interesting of the two: it lets you check whether a rule you have in mind would have worked before you commit money to it, which is a sensible use of historical price data.

The market tracker section goes further, describing an attempt to follow smart money by detecting large-scale transactions and institutional buying patterns. The idea is that big money moves tend to shape trends and move prices, so spotting them early is an edge. The app is designed to help you identify those movements and act on them, and it sends push notifications when significant institutional activity appears.

Alerts, earnings and the news feed

The stock alerter is the part that turns the app from something you open into something that reaches you. The alerter is also described as having real-time tracker capability, so the alert and the underlying data come from the same source.

The same notification system covers the earnings calendar. Rather than you remembering which of your names reports this week, the app notifies investors of upcoming earnings dates, which makes trading around those events simpler. For anyone holding small caps through results season, that is a genuinely useful reminder to have.

The news tab rounds things out with recently breaking global news, and it includes a hot stock tracker showing what investors have been buying recently as an indicator of sentiment. Read that as a sentiment snapshot rather than a recommendation. Combined with the alerts, it gives you a reason to open the app even on days when nothing on your own list is moving.

What it costs and what that buys

Stock Scanner is free to download. It carries no ads, which is unusual for a free finance app and makes for a cleaner experience than a feed interrupted by banners. The trade-off is that it does offer in-app purchases, so the app is not entirely without a paid element.

I cannot tell you whether the purchases relate to extra criteria, longer history or something else. The headline tools — the screener, the market mover gauge, the charts, the alerter and the news tab — are part of the app rather than add-ons. If you are considering it, treat the purchases as an open question to check inside the app.

It has more than 50,000 installs and an average rating of 3.1 from 205 ratings, which is a middling score for a tool of this scope.

How it compares with the alternatives

The obvious alternative is a browser-based screener from a brokerage or a data provider. Those tend to offer deeper historical data and more comfortable screen real estate, but they are tied to a desk and often to an account. Stock Scanner's case rests on being with you when you are away from one, with the same criteria and alerts available on a phone.

A second option is a dedicated charting or portfolio-tracking app. Those usually do one job well — charting, or watching a list of holdings — and leave screening to something else. The appeal of this app is consolidation: scanning, charting, tracking, news and alerts in one place, with the market mover gauge and institutional activity tracking as the parts you would not get from a plain chart viewer.

A third route is a subscription research service that sends you picks and commentary. That is a different proposition, since you are paying for someone else's conclusions rather than running your own filters. Stock Scanner is built around you setting the criteria and drawing your own conclusions, which suits investors who prefer to keep that control.

A focused tool for active small-cap investors

Stock Scanner earns a recommendation for a specific reader: someone who actively screens US-listed stocks, watches small caps and OTC names, and wants alerts and news delivered rather than hunted down. For that person, 93 criteria across technical and fundamental measures, real-time tick updates, charts, backtesting and institutional activity tracking cover a lot of ground in a single free download with no ads.

The reservations are worth stating plainly. The 3.1 average from 205 ratings suggests the experience has not fully satisfied everyone who tried it, and the presence of in-app purchases means the free download is not the whole commercial picture. The app is also clearly oriented toward short-term, opportunity-driven investing, which will not match everyone's approach.

If you already know your way around a screener and want one on your phone, this is a reasonable place to start, particularly given the absence of ads. If your investing is long-term and index-based, the toolset here is aimed at a different job than the one you are doing.

What's new in version 8.1

Fix bugs Update target API level