Finviz Stock Screener
Elite Review & Premarket Setup

Finviz (Financial Visualizations) is a web-based stock research and screening platform. Its core tool is a screener that filters the entire US stock market by dozens of technical and fundamental criteria — float, relative volume, gap %, price range, chart patterns, sector — down to a precise watchlist in seconds. The platform also includes heat maps, insider trading data, news feeds, and basic charting. The free tier requires no signup and is genuinely useful; the Elite plan unlocks real-time data, premarket and after-hours quotes, alerts, API access, and CSV export. This page covers Elite specifically — if you're on the fence, skip to the pricing table below before deciding.

I run a Finviz scan most mornings as the first step in building my own watchlist — well before I ever touch a chart. It's fast, it's filter-rich, and for narrowing thousands of tickers down to a short, relevant list, I haven't found anything quicker. This page covers the Elite plan specifically, since the free tier's delayed data isn't useful for anything happening in real time before the open.

For how I trade, yes — and it comes down to one feature: real-time premarket data. Finviz is the first step of my morning, before I open anything else — I use it to build my premarket briefing and watchlist. During those pre-open hours the free tier's 15–20 minute delay makes it useless: relative volume, gap %, and current volume are the entire point, and numbers that are 15 minutes stale on a stock gapping 40% before the bell aren't data, they're history. Elite makes those filters live. That one thing is what I'm paying $39.50/mo for.

Where it's not worth it: if you screen end-of-day, swing trade off daily bars, or you're still learning the screener, the free tier is genuinely good enough and I'd tell you to stay on it. Elite doesn't add filters or make you a better trader — it removes the delay and adds export and alerts. Pay for it when the delay actually starts costing you setups, not before.

Finviz Elite's premarket data runs from 4:00 AM ET — earlier than most retail traders need, but useful on high-catalyst mornings when a name starts running at 5 or 6 AM on news. By the time I sit down at 8:30, every filter I care about — relative volume, gap %, current volume — reflects what's actually happening right now, not what happened fifteen minutes ago.

That's the specific job Finviz does in my premarket routine: fast, filter-based narrowing of the whole market before I ever open a chart. It takes less than two minutes to run the scan, save the list, and know what I'm watching. No other tool I've used matches it for raw speed at that task.

The free tier's data delay makes it unsuitable as a premarket scanner — 15 minutes of staleness on a stock gapping 40% before the bell isn't data, it's history. The premarket use case is Elite-specific.

Every morning before the open, I run a saved Momentum scan with five filters stacked together:

• Small / micro-cap
• Price under $20
• Float under 20 million shares
• Relative volume over 2×
• Current volume over 5 million shares

Sorted by volume, descending. On a typical morning that narrows the entire market down from tens of thousands of tickers to roughly 15-20 names. That's it — there's no secret sixth filter. The screenshots below are the actual results from a real run, not a mockup.

I'll be straightforward about the limits, too: Finviz's charting tools are functional but basic compared to a dedicated charting platform, and its backtesting module only works on daily timeframes — fine for simple daily-bar rule testing, not for anything intraday. I use it specifically for the screener and premarket data, then move to a separate platform for actual chart analysis.

Fifteen or twenty names is a manageable list, but it's still more than I can watch properly in the twenty minutes before the bell. So I narrowed it further — and because I've spent twenty-five years teaching people to write code, I narrowed it the way a developer would.

I built a small pipeline that runs the same scan through Finviz Elite's data feed, checks each name against the same five filters I'd check by hand, folds in whether there's a real catalyst behind the move, and hands me a short premarket briefing before the open. Tens of thousands of tickers become fifteen or twenty. Fifteen or twenty become five to ten worth actually looking at.

What it does not do is make a single decision. It never places an order, never sends me an alert, and never touches my broker — there is no wire between it and my account, by design. It sorts a list and hands it to me. I still pull up every chart myself, and every trade I take is one I chose, with my own money, looking at the same screen you would be. A shorter list is not a decision. Any tool that offers to make the decision for you is selling you something, and it isn't a tool.

The reason it works at all is the data. A pipeline reading fifteen-minute-old quotes would be worse than useless in the premarket — it would be confidently wrong. But that's not really an argument about automation. It's the same reason the delayed data would fail you if you were sitting there hitting refresh by hand. Fresh data is the requirement. Automating the refresh is just me being lazy about a button.

Finviz isn't trying to be my whole setup, and I don't treat this as Finviz-versus-everything — it does one job well and hands off to the next tool. I screen on Finviz to build my premarket briefing and watchlist, then move to a dedicated charting platform to actually read the setups it surfaces. Here's where the other tools I use or recommend fit alongside it — not as replacements, but as the rest of the stack.

The short version: Finviz and TradingView sit side by side in my setup every session — one finds the names, the other reads the charts. StocksToTrade is the step up if you want scanning and trade-plan tooling in one place and don't mind paying for it.