Two different jobs called screening
A screener narrows thousands of tickers to a handful worth your attention. Every tool doing that is answering one of two quite different questions, and knowing which you are asking saves a lot of wasted evenings.
Filter screening asks "which stocks currently satisfy these numeric conditions" — P/E under 15, market cap above a billion, price above the 200-day. Deterministic, repeatable, and free almost everywhere.
Attention screening asks "which stocks are people suddenly talking about". Different input entirely: text rather than financials, and it surfaces things before they show up in a ratio.
What free filter screeners genuinely do well
They are good, they are free, and the honest advice is to use one. Market cap, P/E and earnings growth, volume and price, moving averages and basic technical levels — the major free screeners cover all of it competently and there is no reason to pay for the basics.
Their real limitation is not accuracy, it is crowding. A filter everyone can run produces a list everyone has. If your screen is "P/E under 15 and rising revenue", you are looking at the same names as every other person who typed that, which does not make them bad picks — it makes them unsurprising ones.
The second limitation is lag. Fundamentals are reported quarterly and technicals confirm after the move. By the time a stock satisfies a trailing condition, the condition is describing something that already happened.
What TradePilot actually offers here — and what it does not
Worth being exact, because "AI screener" gets used loosely and we would rather you arrive with the right expectation.
TradePilot's Explore is attention screening, not filter screening. You can search tickers and narrow by sector, and every ticker carries its live sentiment reading and how many events have mentioned it recently. The useful signal is the mention count moving — a ticker going from two mentions a day to thirty is telling you something before any ratio does.
What it is not: a multi-factor quantitative screener. There is no filtering by P/E, no RSI-setup scan, no backtested factor model. If your workflow is "find me every mid-cap with a PEG under 1 and three quarters of margin expansion", a dedicated fundamental screener is the right tool and we are not it.
Using both, which is the actual answer
They complement rather than compete, and the sequencing matters.
- Use a free fundamental screener to define a universe you would be willing to own — the quality bar, not the timing.
- Watch attention across that universe rather than across the whole market, which is what makes the noise manageable.
- When something in your universe starts getting discussed, read why before acting. The reasoning attached to a sentiment reading names the event count, the source count and the trend, so you can go and look at the underlying material.
- Decide on the fundamentals, not on the attention. Attention tells you when to look; it is a terrible reason on its own.
The failure mode to avoid
Screening on attention alone selects for whatever is loudest, and loudest correlates with promoted, volatile and already-moved far more reliably than it correlates with good. A spike in mentions is equally consistent with real news and with a coordinated push, and sentiment analysis cannot tell those apart.
That is exactly why the universe step comes first. A quality filter applied beforehand means the noisiest thing you see is at least a company you would have been happy to own anyway.
Browse tickers and their live sentiment on Explore, or create a free account.
Nothing here is financial advice. Sentiment and mention counts describe discussion, not value.