> There are some very successful investors who might disagree with that assessment somewhat, to put it mildly
Like who ?
The first thing any "successful investor" will tell you is that there is no magic answer to investing.
If you accept there is no magic answer, then by definition screening does not work.
As I said. In the RIGHT HANDS, screening will give you something that MIGHT be a "shortlist". But that output WILL NOT be actionable, there will be a bunch of time consuming hard manual work to do after that in order to validate/verify/research further. Post-validation you will find most of what the screener outputted was indeed not actionable and IF you are lucky there might be one or two names on the list that are.
You can't just make some magic selections in a screener and expect it to spit out the next ten-bagger. It just doesn't work like that.
I did not say screening tools do all the work. I said that they work. Onviously one uses screening tools as a starting point. But they are step one in every sane approach to analysis.
Companies massage their financials. This, by definition, throws off your screeners (false positives / false negatives).
Other times companies don't screen well, they might be technically "weak" if your definition is based upon screening, but they are actually perfectly viable and actionable investments.
Well any of the ones that have made a profit, for starters.
Even indexes like the S&P 500 are nothing but prefiltered lists of stocks. S&P’s criteria include size and industry. Buffet is famous for filtering out stocks by his own criteria, mainly focusing on the balance sheet.
Nothing is certain, but a good filter increases the likelihood of profit, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.
> Well any of the ones that have made a profit, for starters.
Citation? I've made profit without ever looking at a screening tool or doing technical analysis.
> Nothing is certain, but a good filter increases the likelihood of profit, sometimes to a ridiculous degree.
Citation?
Analysts do tons of technical analysis and fail to beat SPY. Buffet himself even made a Long Bet with someone to this point. I'm surprised you'd use him as an example...
There are some very successful investors who might disagree with that assessment somewhat, to put it mildly