48,000 securities, roughly 30,000 companies (some are listed on multiple stock exchanges). And rather than starting with individual stocks or securities, the Screener.co technology allows users to input market conditions or data points in order to find stocks that satisfy their criteria, and study them from there to decide whether to invest. It has roughly 1,000 screening conditions for sorting stocks, compared to Google and Yahoo’s roughly 150, Grover says.
“You need to figure out very quickly which stocks to focus your attention on and research on,” Grover says. Screener.co allows you to “whittle it down, and make it manageable. It’s a way to take a high level view of the market and narrow it down to the stocks you want to focus on. And bring a global perspective to your investing.” The tool also converts everything to U.S. dollars, so investment data is all apples to apples, Grover says.
For now, Grover is Screener.co’s only full-time employee, and he’s been outsourcing some of the development work on the website. That means he’s the main customer service rep for customers of the software, which he admits can be complicated to initially navigate, due to the swarms of data. “I need to understand what they’re dealing with on a day-to-day basis,” Grover says of Screener.co users.
He’s intentionally self-funding the operation at this point so the company can “show enough progress that we can justify what we’re looking for” from outside investors. In the mean time, Grover is out to build up his team. Screener.co will hit customers via direct marketing, and with partnerships or distribution agreements with retail investing firms, who could subsidize the tool for high net-worth individuals. “There’s a huge push in the brokerage front to attract and retain the massive asset set,” he says.
When I met with Grover last week, Screener.co had attracted about 200 users in its four or so days since launching, which he was happy with for a niche product. He says that the public’s reluctance to trust big financial institutions could draw more customers to his product. “Because of the bad behavior on Wall Street, they could take [investing] upon themselves and not trust institutional investors,” he says.
