Lesson 1

Find stocks and keep them

By the end of this lesson you can put any company in the world on your screen — including one Uncle Stock has never been asked about — and keep the ones you care about somewhere they will still be tomorrow.

1Search by name or ticker

The box at the top left of the screener is where everything starts. Type a company name or a ticker and Uncle Stock offers matches as you type.

• ↑ and ↓ move through the suggestions.
• Enter takes the highlighted one, or the first if you have not moved.
• Esc closes the list.

1 2 3 4 5

1. Search by name or ticker
2. Paste a whole list of tickers
3. Screens… — ready-made screens
4. ⚙ Screen stocks — build your own
5. My lists — your saved lists

2Tickers carry their exchange

A ticker on its own is ambiguous — plenty of companies share one. Uncle Stock uses the ticker plus an exchange suffix, in the notation Yahoo Finance made common. American listings need no suffix; everything else does.

That is not the full list of markets — Uncle Stock covers many more. It is the list of suffixes that are easy to get wrong. When in doubt, type the company's name instead and let the suggestions tell you the ticker.

3A company nobody has looked up yet

The suggestions only offer companies Uncle Stock already holds. That is a large number, but it is not every listed company on earth — and a company only arrives once somebody asks for it.

So if you type a valid ticker and it is not offered, you are not stuck. A row appears reading Add <TICKER> as a new stock. Choose it, and Uncle Stock fetches the company, computes its metrics, and adds it — for you and for everyone after you. It takes a moment, and then the company behaves like any other.

You need to be signed in for this, since it is a real import rather than a lookup.

4Add a whole list at once

The + beside the search box opens a paste box. Drop in a column of tickers — from a spreadsheet, a broker statement, an article — and they all land on the board together. This is the fastest way to bring an existing portfolio in.

5The White board is a scratch pad

Everything you look up lands on the White board tab. Think of it as the desk you work on rather than the drawer you file in: it starts empty every time, it survives reloading the page, and it disappears when you close the browser tab. The × on the tab itself empties it in one go.

6Stock lists are the drawer

A stock list is a named, saved set of companies. Open the My lists button to create one, open one as its own tab, or delete one. Bronze keeps one list; a Gold pack lets you keep as many as you like — one per theme, one per broker account, one for the things you are only watching.

7Moving stocks in and out

1. Tick the rows you want. A bar appears with the count and what you can do with them.

2. Use + Add to list… to file the whole selection, or × Remove to take it off the board.

3. Or work one row at a time. Every row carries its own + and ×. Where those sit is your choice — the ⋯ menu on the right has a setting for it, which matters once you scroll a wide table sideways.