CANSLIM stock screener: how to screen for O'Neil's growth criteria online

A CANSLIM stock screener automates William O'Neil's seven-factor methodology by filtering for stocks with accelerating earnings, new highs, rising institutional ownership, and strong relative strength.

This guide walks through each letter, explains what to screen for, gives the thresholds O'Neil used (and the ones most practitioners use today), and compares the tools that can run the full scan for you. If you already know the basics and want a deeper look at each criterion, see the companion article on CANSLIM screening criteria.

What CANSLIM stands for

Before diving into the screener settings, here is the quick reference table. Each row shows the letter, what it measures, and the minimum threshold a stock should meet to qualify.

Now let us break each one down in detail, with the exact numbers you would plug into a screener.

C -- Current quarterly earnings per share

The C in CANSLIM is the most straightforward: look at the company's most recent quarterly earnings per share and compare it to the same quarter one year ago. O'Neil found that the vast majority of winning stocks showed at least a 25% increase in quarterly EPS before their big moves. Many showed 50% to 100% or more.

When building a CANSLIM stock screener, the C filter is usually your first pass. Set a minimum year-over-year quarterly EPS growth of 25%. Some traders tighten this to 40% or 50% during strong markets when there are plenty of qualifying names. The key is acceleration: a stock whose earnings grew 10% two quarters ago, 25% last quarter, and 50% this quarter is more interesting than one that has grown a steady 30% for four straight quarters. Acceleration signals that something new is driving the business.

You should also check that revenue is growing alongside earnings. A company can boost EPS through cost-cutting or share buybacks, but the best CANSLIM candidates show both top-line and bottom-line growth. A secondary filter of at least 20% quarterly revenue growth helps weed out financial engineering.

A -- Annual earnings growth

The A criterion extends the earnings check from one quarter to the full year, and then to a multi-year trend. O'Neil wanted to see annual EPS growth of at least 25% per year for each of the last three years. This requirement separates one-quarter wonders from companies with a durable growth engine.

In a screener, you would set annual EPS growth greater than or equal to 25% for each of the past three fiscal years. Some screeners let you set a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) instead; a three-year EPS CAGR of 25% or more is a reasonable proxy. You can also add a return-on-equity filter of at least 17%, which O'Neil considered a sign of management quality. High ROE combined with strong earnings growth tells you the company is not just growing, but growing efficiently.

The A filter tends to be the most restrictive in the entire CANSLIM checklist. Many companies can post one good quarter, but sustaining 25% annual growth for three consecutive years is difficult. When a stock clears this bar, it usually means the underlying business has a genuine competitive advantage.

N -- New products, new management, or new price highs

The N stands for something new: a new product, a new CEO, a new industry condition, or -- most practically for a screener -- a new price high. O'Neil observed that big stock moves almost always came from companies doing something new, often appearing as breakout stocks on a scanner. The iPhone, cloud computing, a breakthrough drug, a shift to subscription revenue. The fundamental catalyst is hard to screen for in an automated way, but the price high is not.

In your CANSLIM stock screener, set a filter for stocks trading within 15% of their 52-week high. This is a proxy for the "new high" idea. Stocks near new highs are not broken; they are being accumulated. Many traders who are new to the method struggle with this one because it feels counterintuitive to buy stocks near their highs rather than looking for bargains. But O'Neil's data was clear: the greatest winners were making new highs as they launched into their biggest advances, not sitting at 52-week lows.

Some screeners also let you filter for stocks that have made a new 52-week high within the last five trading sessions. That is an even tighter version of the N filter and tends to produce a shorter, more actionable list.

S -- Supply and demand

The S criterion looks at the stock's share structure and trading volume. O'Neil preferred companies with a reasonable number of shares outstanding -- not so many that it takes massive institutional buying to move the price, and not so few that the stock is illiquid. In practice, he favored mid-cap and large-cap stocks with some float constraint: companies where demand from fund managers could meaningfully push the price up because the supply of shares was limited.

For a CANSLIM stock screener, the S filter typically has two parts. First, look at volume behavior: up days should show higher volume than down days. This is a sign that institutions are accumulating shares. You can filter for stocks where the 50-day average volume is at least 400,000 shares (to ensure tradability) and where recent up-volume exceeds down-volume.

Second, consider shares outstanding. O'Neil did not set a hard cutoff, but he noted that stocks with fewer shares outstanding tended to move faster. A practical filter is to exclude mega-caps with more than two billion shares outstanding, while also excluding micro-caps with average daily dollar volume below one million dollars. This keeps the list in the tradeable sweet spot.

The supply-and-demand dynamic is also visible in the price-volume relationship. When a stock breaks out of a base on volume that is 50% or more above its average, that is a clear sign that demand is overwhelming supply. The institutional buying volume article covers this in more detail.

L -- Leader or laggard

The L criterion is about relative strength. O'Neil developed the Relative Strength (RS) rating, a percentile ranking from 1 to 99 that compares a stock's price performance over the last 12 months to every other stock in the market. He insisted on buying only stocks with an RS rating of 80 or above, meaning the stock had outperformed at least 80% of all other stocks.

In a CANSLIM stock screener, relative strength is one of the most powerful filters. It enforces a simple rule: buy leaders, avoid laggards. A stock might have great earnings, but if its price has underperformed the market for the past year, something is wrong. Maybe the market knows something the earnings have not yet reflected, or maybe institutional investors are not buying.

Not every screener calculates RS the same way IBD does. Some use a simple 12-month price change percentile; others weight recent performance more heavily. The exact formula matters less than the principle: you want stocks in the top 20% of price performance. If your screener does not have a built-in RS ranking, you can approximate it by requiring that the stock's six-month price change is in the top quintile and that it is outperforming its sector index.

One nuance: O'Neil would also look at the RS rating of the stock's industry group. He wanted to buy leaders within leading industry groups. A stock with an RS of 90 in a group ranked in the top 20 of 197 industry groups is a much better candidate than an RS-90 stock in a group ranked 150th. Group strength matters because institutional money tends to flow into sectors, not just individual names.

I -- Institutional sponsorship

The I criterion checks whether professional money managers own the stock and, more importantly, whether the number of institutional holders is increasing. O'Neil wanted to see a rising count of mutual funds and other institutional investors owning shares over the last several quarters. This is important because institutions account for the majority of trading volume, and their sustained buying is what drives big price moves.

In a CANSLIM stock screener, the institutional sponsorship filter typically requires that the number of institutional holders has increased for at least two consecutive quarters. Some traders also add a minimum ownership threshold: at least a handful of well-known growth funds should own the stock. If no reputable fund manager has taken a position, that is a yellow flag.

You do not want too much institutional ownership, however. A stock where 95% of the float is locked up by institutions has limited upside from further accumulation. O'Neil looked for the sweet spot: enough sponsorship to confirm quality, but not so much that everyone who wants to own it already does. A practical range is 20% to 70% institutional ownership of the float.

Screening for institutional sponsorship changes is harder than screening for earnings or price. Many free screeners do not offer it. This is one of the reasons a dedicated William O'Neil stock scanner or a tool like MarketSmith exists: they track quarterly 13F filings and aggregate the data into a single sponsorship score. The institutional buying volume guide explains how to read these signals in more detail.

M -- Market direction

The M is the one criterion that has nothing to do with the individual stock. It asks a simple question: is the overall market in an uptrend? O'Neil found that three out of four stocks follow the general market direction. If the major indexes are in a downtrend or under heavy distribution, even the best CANSLIM stocks will struggle.

For a CANSLIM stock screener, the M filter acts as a master switch. When the market is in a confirmed uptrend, you run your scan and act on the results. When the market is in correction, you either stop buying or significantly reduce position sizes. O'Neil tracked this using distribution-day counts and follow-through days, a method that IBD still publishes as The Big Picture column.

There are several ways to build an M filter into a screener. The simplest is to check whether the S&P 500 and Nasdaq are both above their 50-day and 200-day moving averages. A more refined approach tracks the number of distribution days (sessions where the index falls 0.2% or more on higher volume) over the past 25 trading sessions. Five or more distribution days clustered together is a warning. You can read more about interpreting market internals in the market breadth article.

Many traders overlook the M criterion because it requires patience. It means sitting out during corrections and only deploying capital when conditions are favorable. But O'Neil's track record showed that respecting the M was one of the biggest edges in his entire system. It kept him out of bear markets and concentrated his buying in the periods most likely to produce winners.

Putting the screen together

When you combine all seven letters into a single CANSLIM stock screener, the filter chain looks like this:

1. Quarterly EPS growth of at least 25% year over year (C)
2. Annual EPS growth of at least 25% for each of the past three years (A)
3. Stock price within 15% of its 52-week high (N)
4. Average daily volume above 400,000 shares; up-volume exceeding down-volume (S)
5. Relative strength ranking in the 80th percentile or above (L)
6. Rising institutional holder count for at least two quarters (I)
7. Major indexes in a confirmed uptrend (M)

In a bull market, this combination typically returns 50 to 150 stocks on any given day. In a correction, it may return zero. That is by design. The CANSLIM method is not supposed to give you trades every day; it is supposed to give you the highest-probability trades when the environment supports them.

Tools that screen for CANSLIM

Not every stock screener can run a full CANSLIM scan. The earnings and price filters are widely available, but the relative strength ranking, institutional sponsorship trend, and market direction filter are not. Here is how the main options compare.

MarketSmith / MarketSurge (paid)

MarketSmith (now MarketSurge) is the tool O'Neil's firm built specifically around the CANSLIM method. It includes proprietary RS ratings, EPS ratings, accumulation/distribution grades, and a market status indicator. It is a comprehensive implementation of the CANSLIM methodology, but it comes at a premium price ($45/month) and has a steep learning curve. It also lacks SEC filing integration, catalyst detection, and the cross-methodology scanning that helps you find stocks qualifying across multiple systems simultaneously.

Finviz (partial)

Finviz is a popular free screener that covers much of the fundamental side of CANSLIM. You can filter by EPS growth, sales growth, ROE, and proximity to 52-week highs. What it lacks is a composite relative strength ranking, institutional sponsorship trend data, and any kind of market direction filter. You can use Finviz to build a rough first pass, but you will need to manually verify the L, I, and M criteria elsewhere.

SwingTradeScanner

The CANSLIM scan on SwingTradeScanner scores every liquid US stock against all seven CANSLIM criteria after each trading session. It combines fundamental data (earnings, revenue, ROE, institutional filings) with a technical overlay (relative strength ranking, volume analysis, market regime). Each stock receives a composite score from 0 to 100, and you can sort and filter by any criterion. The scan also flags which stocks are near actionable chart setups, so you are not just finding fundamentally sound companies but timing your entries around bases and breakout points.

What sets SwingTradeScanner apart from both MarketSurge and Finviz is the integration layer. Because the scanner runs six other methodology-specific scans alongside CANSLIM -- including the Minervini SEPA scan, episodic pivot detection with SEC filing analysis, and momentum breakout scanning -- you can cross-reference CANSLIM results with pattern-based and catalyst-driven scans in one view. Stocks that appear on multiple scans tend to be the strongest candidates. See the full best swing trading scanner comparison for how it stacks up. No other tool offers this cross-methodology approach, and at $20 per month (less than half the cost of MarketSurge), it includes SEC filing detection and dilution warnings that MarketSurge does not provide at any price.

IBD's methodology versus automated screening

Investor's Business Daily, the publication O'Neil founded, applies CANSLIM through a proprietary system that includes composite ratings (EPS Rating, RS Rating, Accumulation/Distribution Grade, SMR Rating) and a market status indicator (The Big Picture column). MarketSmith, IBD's premium product, wraps these ratings into a screening interface. The question many traders ask is: how does automated screening compare to following IBD's own approach?

The difference is less about the criteria and more about the timing signals. IBD's market status indicator tells you when the market is in a "confirmed uptrend," "uptrend under pressure," or "market in correction." This status is determined by a team that counts distribution days and evaluates follow-through days qualitatively. An automated screener can replicate the distribution-day count mechanically, but the qualitative judgment (was that distribution day heavy enough to count? did the follow-through day have enough participation?) is where human and automated approaches diverge.

In practice, a well-built automated CANSLIM screener produces results very similar to IBD's stock lists. The overlap is typically 70-80% on any given day. The differences tend to be at the margins: stocks that are borderline on the RS rating, or stocks where the institutional sponsorship data is interpreted differently due to filing timing. For most traders, the convenience and speed of automated screening outweigh the small accuracy differences.

Building a CANSLIM watchlist workflow

A CANSLIM stock screener is only useful if it feeds into a disciplined workflow. Here is how to turn scan output into a watchlist that leads to actual trades.

Weekly watchlist refresh

Every weekend, run the full seven-letter CANSLIM scan. Sort the results by relative strength ranking, highest first. The top 20 to 30 names become your primary watchlist for the week. These are the stocks you will study in detail: reviewing charts for base patterns, checking recent earnings reports, and noting upcoming catalyst dates.

Daily narrowing

Each evening, re-run the scan or review updated results. Some stocks will have dropped off the list because their price fell below a moving average or their relative strength declined. New stocks will appear as they report strong earnings or their price action improves. Your daily task is to narrow the weekly watchlist to the five to ten names that are closest to an actionable setup -- stocks forming tight bases, approaching pivot points, or showing volume dry-ups that precede breakouts.

Catalyst calendar

Overlay your watchlist with an earnings calendar. Stocks that report earnings within the next two weeks carry event risk that the CANSLIM screener cannot account for. You have two choices: wait for the report and re-evaluate afterward, or enter before the report with reduced size and a wider stop. Neither approach is wrong, but you need to make the decision deliberately rather than discovering an earnings date after you have taken a full position.

Cross-referencing with other scans

Stocks that appear on multiple scans deserve extra attention. A stock that passes the full CANSLIM screen and also shows up on the SEPA trend template scan has both the fundamental quality and the technical confirmation that the best winners exhibit. SwingTradeScanner makes this cross-referencing easy by showing which scans each stock appears on, so you can prioritize the names with the broadest support across multiple methodologies.

Position sizing from scan quality

Not all CANSLIM qualifiers deserve the same position size. A stock that passes all seven criteria with strong margins (50%+ quarterly EPS growth, RS above 90, accelerating institutional sponsorship) warrants a larger position than one that barely clears each threshold. If the stock also shows a volatility contraction pattern, conviction is even higher. Use the scan data to calibrate your conviction, and let conviction drive position size. The position size calculator can help you translate conviction levels into dollar amounts based on your stop distance and account size.

What CANSLIM misses

The CANSLIM method is thorough, but no screening system is complete. There are a few blind spots worth understanding so you can compensate for them in your workflow.

Catalyst timing

CANSLIM uses backward-looking earnings data. A stock might have posted 25% quarterly EPS growth last quarter, but if the company just guided lower for next quarter, the screen does not know. Earnings surprises, guidance changes, and analyst revisions happen between quarterly reports. A pure CANSLIM screener will not catch a deteriorating outlook until the numbers actually come in. This is why many traders supplement CANSLIM with a news and catalyst review. Checking for recent earnings revisions, upcoming earnings dates, and sector-level headwinds adds a layer the screener cannot provide on its own.

Sector context

While the L criterion captures relative strength at the stock level, CANSLIM does not explicitly rank sectors the way some other systems do. O'Neil himself paid close attention to industry group rankings, but many CANSLIM screeners reduce the method to just the seven individual-stock filters. If you are running a CANSLIM screen without sector ranking, you might end up with a list of stocks concentrated in one or two sectors. That is not necessarily wrong -- sector concentration is common in strong markets -- but it does increase your portfolio's exposure to a single industry reversal.

Base structure

The N criterion gets you to stocks near new highs, but it does not tell you whether the stock is breaking out of a proper base or simply extended. O'Neil devoted entire chapters of his books to cup-with-handle patterns, flat bases, and double bottoms. A stock can pass all seven CANSLIM criteria and still be a poor entry if it is already 15% above its last proper buy point. The CANSLIM screening criteria article goes into more detail on how to combine the fundamental screen with chart pattern recognition.

Position sizing and risk management

CANSLIM tells you what to buy and when the market is favorable, but it does not dictate how much to buy or where to set your stop loss. O'Neil recommended cutting losses at 7-8% below the purchase price, but position sizing is a separate discipline. A screener output is a list of candidates, not a portfolio. You still need a risk management framework to decide how many positions to hold and how much capital to allocate to each one.

Running the screen in practice

Here is a straightforward daily workflow for using a CANSLIM stock screener effectively.

First, check the M criterion. If the market is in a correction or under distribution, you do not need to run the rest of the screen. Wait for a follow-through day or a return to a confirmed uptrend. This step alone saves you from the most common CANSLIM mistake: buying great stocks in a bad market.

Second, run the full seven-letter scan. Review the output list sorted by relative strength. The top RS names are usually the most interesting because they have the market's strongest vote of confidence behind them.

Third, check each candidate's chart. Is it forming a base? Is it near a buy point? Or is it extended? Stocks that pass all seven criteria but are already 20% above their last base are not actionable right now. Put them on a watchlist and wait for the next setup.

Fourth, verify the catalyst. Look at the most recent earnings report, any recent news, and the next earnings date. A stock that reports earnings in two days carries event risk that the screener does not account for.

Fifth, size the position. Use a fixed-risk model: decide how much you are willing to lose, set your stop, and calculate the number of shares that keeps your risk at that dollar amount. The CANSLIM scan page makes it easy to track these candidates and monitor them as they set up.

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