You can create your own custom criteria to be used to sort by or in the creation of EasyScans. These criteria are stored as Personal Criteria.
There are two basic types of Personal Criteria: criteria that are evaluated to a true/false condition and criteria that are evaluated to a range of values. Criteria that are evaluated to a range of values will display these values when used as a sort criteria and produce a range selector when they are selected as EasyScan conditions.
We recommend creating criteria that produce a range selector whenever possible because they give you much more information to work with and are reusable.
For a simple illustration, let’s say you wanted a criterion to find stocks that are up today from the previous day’s close. You could write a formula like C > C1 (today’s close greater than the close yesterday), but this would only be useful if you wanted to include stocks that are up from yesterday. But what if in another scan you wanted stocks that were down. If you used the formula above, you would have to create another Personal Criteria called "Stocks down today" and use the formula C < C1. Now, every time you update your Personal Criteria, two formulas would have to be evaluated.
You could kill two birds with one stone by using the formula C – C1 (today’s close minus yesterday’s close). C – C1 will give you the value of the difference between today's close and yesterday's. If the value is positive you know it closed up today, if the value is negative you know it closed lower today, if the value is 0 it closed unchanged today. You can view these values if you sort by this Personal Criteria Formula or you can select the exact range of values you are interested in using the range selected generated when this PCF is used in an EasyScan.
To find stocks that are down today, set the range selector to negative Values:
For unchanged, set the range selector to cover the range of stocks with a Value of 0:
