Best Stock Screener with Backtesting for Value Investors

For a value investor the deciding feature in a screener with backtesting is not the number of filters or the size of the factor library. It is whether the backtest uses point-in-time fundamentals. Portfolio123 is the one mainstream option that states plainly that its stock history is point-in-time, and its retail tiers run from $25 to $200 a month billed annually depending on how many years of history you want. Stock Rover screens fundamentals well but does historical screening rather than rule-based strategy simulation. Finviz has no backtester at all any more. That is the short answer, read off the vendors' own pages on September 5, 2026.

The reason point-in-time matters so much more to a value screen than to a technical one is worth spelling out, because it is the difference between a backtest that means something and one that quietly cheated.

What is look-ahead bias in a fundamental backtest?

Look-ahead bias is using information in a test that nobody could have had on the date the test acts. In a price-based backtest it is rare and obvious, because yesterday's close is yesterday's close. In a fundamental backtest it is the default state of the data unless the vendor has gone to real trouble to prevent it, and it arrives through two separate doors.

The first is the reporting lag. A company's fiscal year ends on December 31 and the annual figures do not exist publicly for weeks. A large accelerated filer generally has 60 days to file its 10-K, an accelerated filer 75 days, and everyone else 90. Quarterly reports run to roughly 40 or 45 days. So a screen that ranks stocks by trailing earnings on January 2 using figures dated December 31 is buying on numbers that will not be published for another two months. Backtest that and the results will look wonderful, because you are effectively trading on next quarter's filings.

The second door is restatement, and it is the one that catches careful people. Financial data vendors normally store the current, corrected version of a company's history. When a company restates, the vendor overwrites the old figures. Run a backtest against that database and your 2015 screen sees 2015 as it was later understood to have been, including the corrections that were made in 2017. Every company that had to restate downward looks healthier in your test than it did to anyone alive at the time, and those are disproportionately the companies whose stock later fell.

A point-in-time database solves both by storing what was known, and when it became known, rather than what turned out to be true. Portfolio123 describes its offering as "academically vetted point-in-time data for precise, real-world backtesting" and labels the row in its own feature table Stocks (Point In Time). That is a specific claim about how the data is stored, not a marketing adjective, and it is the single line on the pricing page a value investor should care most about.

This is a data lineage problem before it is an investing problem. If two platforms disagree about what a company's book value was in 2015, the answer is never in the screener, it is in which version of the record you are looking at and when it changed. Teams that track that for their warehouse tables already have the instinct; investors usually meet it for the first time when a backtest looks too good.

What is the best stock screener with backtesting for value investors?

Here is the comparison that actually decides it, with prices and capability read at source on September 5, 2026.

Portfolio123 wins this on the criterion that matters for fundamentals, and it is not close. It is also the most expensive way to do the job properly, which is an honest thing to say about the tool we are recommending here.

How many years of backtest history does a value strategy need?

More than a momentum strategy needs, for a structural reason. Value strategies rebalance slowly, often quarterly or annually, so calendar time converts into very few independent decisions. A screen rebalanced once a year over 5 years gives you five rebalances. Five. No amount of statistical sophistication rescues a sample that size.

Worse, value has long stretches of underperformance that are longer than the entry tier's whole window. Anyone who tested a value screen over the five years to 2020 would have concluded value was broken; anyone who tested the five years to 2022 would have concluded it was excellent. Same strategy, opposite verdicts, purely from where the window landed.

This is why the tier you buy is a research decision and not a budgeting one. Portfolio123's Screener tier at $25 a month billed annually buys 5 years. It also ships the full factor database, more than 4,300 factors and 430 functions. That combination deserves a warning, because it is precisely the setup that published research says produces false results: Bailey, Borwein, Lopez de Prado and Zhu showed in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in May 2014 that with only 5 years of daily data, testing more than 45 independent configurations near-guarantees an in-sample Sharpe ratio of 1.0 with an expected out-of-sample Sharpe of zero. A 4,300-factor library will pass 45 configurations before lunch.

Price the tiers by what they actually buy and the ladder looks different again:

History gets more expensive per unit as you buy more of it, which is the opposite of how volume pricing normally works. For a value investor running annual rebalances, the jump from Screener to Backtest is the one that changes the answer, because it takes you from five decisions to ten.

Is Stock Rover good for value investing?

Yes for research, no for strategy testing, and the distinction is easy to miss because reviews blur it. Stock Rover is genuinely strong on fundamental screening and portfolio analytics, and its compare-plans table shows historical fundamentals of 5, 10, 20 and 20 years across its four tiers, price history of 10, 20, 20 and 20 years, and dividend history stretching to 30 years on the upper plans. For studying companies and tracking a portfolio it is good value.

What it does is historical screening: which stocks would have matched these filters on a past date. What it does not do is simulate a rule with entry conditions, exit conditions, position sizing and trading costs, then hand you a trade-by-trade record. If your question is "would buying the cheapest quintile by EV/EBITDA each January and holding twelve months have beaten the index after costs", that is a strategy backtest, and it is a different product.

Two tier limits worth knowing before you subscribe: data exports are capped at 10, 90, 500 and 2,500 a month across the four plans, and fair value, stock scores and investor warnings are restricted to 20 tickers a month plus the Dow 30 on the entry tier. Research reports and hotline support are $50 add-ons.

Does Finviz have backtesting?

No, and this is the most common wrong answer in the category. Finviz once published a backtests section. The URL finviz.com/backtests returns HTTP 410 Gone, which we re-checked on September 5, 2026. A 410 is not a broken link; it is the server stating deliberately that the resource has been permanently removed. Roundups written before that change still list Finviz as a screener with backtesting, and they are simply out of date.

Finviz Elite at $39.50 a month, or $299.50 a year which works out to $24.96 a month, remains one of the fastest screeners available and includes API access. Buy it for screening. Do not buy it expecting to test anything. Its 7-day trial auto-renews, so set a reminder.

Can a financial advisor buy these retail plans?

Frequently not at the advertised price. Portfolio123 scopes its non-professional plans to individual investors managing personal accounts under $5 million and runs a separate professional track for firms, educators and research providers. That pattern is now common across the whole market, and it catches people who assumed price was the only variable. The exchange definition it rests on, and the vendor tiers a registered firm is barred from buying at any price, are set out on professional versus non-professional subscriber status.

One more billing detail that applies to everyone. Portfolio123's advertised $25, $84, $125 and $200 are annual rates. Paying month to month costs $35, $116, $174 and $278, a premium of 38% to 40% worth between $120 and $936 a year, and those monthly figures are not in the page source until you click the billing toggle.

The verdict

If you are testing fundamental screens with real money behind them, buy Portfolio123 and buy at least the Backtest tier at $84 a month billed annually for its 10 years. The Screener tier at $25 is a fine place to learn the interface and a bad place to reach a conclusion, because five years of a slow-rebalancing strategy is a handful of decisions measured against a factor library large enough to guarantee you find something.

If you mainly want to study companies rather than test rules, Stock Rover is the better buy and cheaper. If you want fast screening and visualization, Finviz Elite is excellent and has no backtester. The full nine-tool comparison, including the cost-per-year-of-history arithmetic for every tier, is on our stock screener with backtesting page, and the engines that test rules without screening first are compared on backtesting software.

There is a third path worth mentioning honestly, since it is what we build. A screener starts with a filter and searches for something that worked; a thesis-first bench starts with one idea you already have a reason to believe and tests it once against 20+ years of split- and dividend-adjusted daily history with a 0.1% cost per trade assumed by default. That inverts the overfitting problem rather than solving it, and it does not replace a screener, because it will not hand you a filtered list of matching tickers. AgentTrading starts at $19 a month. It executes no trades, connects to no brokerage, and gives no personalized investment advice. If your thesis is about a specific company rather than a factor, AI stock research is the closer fit.

Prices and capabilities were read from the vendors' own pages on the dates given and vendors change both without notice. Verify before you buy.