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First Trust, Stock Screeners

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Jun 16, 2009 7:39 pm

Does anyone know how you can duplicate the First Trust Portfolios UITs, by running the screens yourself?



What Stock screener has that capability…

Jun 19, 2009 3:50 am

[quote=tqspygame]Does anyone know how you can duplicate the First Trust Portfolios UITs, by running the screens yourself?



What Stock screener has that capability…[/quote]

They use S&P Compustat with ALL the add-ons.  It’ll run you about $40-75k per year for the full suite.

Or, you could just look at their holdings in their January series and do the trades yourself.  Only problem is a lot of advisors are doing this and execution in some of their portfolios could get a little tricky if you manage a lot of money.

Otherwise the only way you can accurately duplicate their exact screen is via Compustat.  Don’t try some of the cheapy screening programs as they do NOT have survivorship data.  Meaning, they will allow you to test your strategy and it will look awesome, but they leave out all the companies that don’t exist today in the historical backtest.  As far as I know, only Compustat has all companies (enron, lehman, pets.com, etc) in their database - which is why the major institutional players all use it.

Good luck - it’s tough to build your own models, but can be done if you have some programming knowledge and a little dough to invest.

Jun 19, 2009 3:52 am

Correction - the full suite is 100k plus per year.  The basic screener is about $35k per year.