One set of rules, two independent tools, and a discrepancy worth reading instead of ignoring.
A lot of people ask us where we find good companies to buy. The honest answer is that we don't — not directly. What we do is set the rules first, then let a screener tell us which companies happen to satisfy them. This matters because "good company" is not an objective category. It is a set of parameters — a dividend floor, a debt ceiling, a growth minimum — that reflects a particular view of risk. Someone else's parameters will surface a completely different list, and neither list is more correct than the other. What follows is the method, not a stock pick.
There are plenty of strong screeners built specifically for the U.S. market. International coverage is thinner. Two free tools that do cover non-U.S. exchanges are Uncle Stock and TradingView's built-in screener — both let you filter by country, dividend yield, leverage ratios, and a range of other fundamentals without paying for a data terminal.
Rules Before Results
A screener is a filter, not an opinion. You give it a universe of stocks and a set of numerical thresholds, and it returns whichever companies clear every threshold — nothing more. It does not know a company's story, its management quality, or its competitive position. It only knows whether the numbers in its database happen to satisfy the conditions you wrote down.
That is precisely the appeal. Deciding on the rules before looking at any names forces the discipline that most retail research skips: you commit to "dividend yield above 4%, debt-to-equity below 50%" before you know which companies that implies, rather than picking companies you already like and rationalizing the numbers afterward. The screener is a discipline device as much as a discovery tool.
Two Tools, Not One
We run every screen through two independent tools rather than one, for a simple reason: each pulls its underlying fundamentals from a different data vendor, updates on a different schedule, and sometimes defines the same ratio differently — gross debt versus net debt, trailing yield versus forward yield, latest reported quarter versus latest available quarter. Run the identical criteria through two sources and you will rarely get an identical list back. That gap is not a flaw in either tool. It is information about how reliable a given data point actually is.
Say we want an Australian company yielding more than 4% with debt-to-equity under 50%.
Set those three conditions in Uncle Stock and again in TradingView's screener, and it is genuinely useful — not just a curiosity — that the two result lists usually only partially overlap.
Reading The Gap
Names that clear the bar on both tools deserve the first look. Two independently sourced datasets agreeing on a dividend yield and a leverage ratio is a mild form of confirmation — it does not guarantee the number is right, but it rules out a single vendor's data error or a stale price feed being the whole explanation.
Names that appear on only one list are the more interesting case, and the instinct to discard them is usually wrong. The disagreement is worth tracing back to its source — a different fiscal-year-end being used, a recent capital raise one vendor has priced in and the other has not, a dividend that was just cut but only one database has updated. Sometimes the "missing" name is the more accurate one; the screener that excluded it was working from stale data. A five-minute check of the company's own latest filing settles it either way, and settling it is the actual work — the screener only narrows the pool of names worth checking.
One caveat worth stating plainly: free tools get discontinued, repriced, or restricted without warning. Confirm a screener is still active and still free before building a routine around it — the method above (set the rules, cross-check two independent sources, investigate the disagreement) is what's durable, not any specific tool name.
The Discipline Is The Product
A screener doesn't find good companies. It finds companies that match rules you set in advance — and the disagreement between two independent screeners is where the real due diligence starts, not where it ends.
