That sounds simple, but most stock screeners are built around finding more: more scans, more filters, more alerts, more stocks that match a condition. If a stock is near a 52-week high, the screener shows it. If volume has increased or price has crossed a moving average, it shows that too. All of that information can be useful, and the trader is still left with the question that matters: which of these should I spend time on?
SMC focuses on swing and positional trading, mainly for people who cannot sit in front of a market screen all day. For that kind of trader, a list of 100 stocks is not helpful. The whole point of a screener should be to reduce the work, not create more of it.
For a long time, the team did this reduction manually. They checked market conditions in one place, sectors in another, technical scans somewhere else, and then opened individual charts one by one. The same work kept repeating every week, and in 2025 it led Rastogi to start building ProScreener. He did not come from a software background; he learned as he built, using AI tools to understand the code and keep adding what the system needed. The platform started because the team wanted one place that followed the same process they were already using in their own research.
The difference was in where the process started. "Most traders find the stock first and check the market last," Rastogi says. "We do it in the opposite order." Instead of jumping straight to individual stocks, the team looked at the broader market first. If the overall market was weak, that changed how aggressively they wanted to search for trades. Then came sectors. Only after that did individual stocks and setups become important.
The order matters because a stock usually arrives with a story already attached. It shows up on a scan or a social media feed, the chart starts looking interesting, and by the time the trader checks the broader market or the sector, they may already be searching for reasons to justify the idea. A technically attractive breakout during broad market strength is not the same trade as an identical-looking setup while market breadth is weakening.
ProScreener follows the same order, using relative strength, liquidity, price and volume behaviour, market structure and defined setups to narrow the market step by step.
A screener does not have to give you stocks every time. Traders often feel that if a scan gives 30 names it is useful, but if it gives only two or three, something must be wrong. In reality, there will be weeks when few stocks fit a particular trading style, and changing the filters just because the list looks too small defeats the purpose. Sometimes a short list is exactly what you want. Sometimes even an empty list is useful, because it tells you the market is not offering much that fits your method.
The same is true of activity. Opening hundreds of charts can feel like research, and a watchlist of 70 or 80 stocks can feel thorough, but volume of effort does not reliably produce better decisions. A tight process may end with fewer charts studied and fewer trades taken, because most of the work has already happened at the filtering stage.
This is also why Smart Money Club has kept its work centred on one style of trading instead of constantly adding new strategies. The recorded learning, the weekly live market sessions and ProScreener are all built around the same swing and positional framework.
Finding stock ideas is only going to get easier. AI can already read results, break down charts and build scans in seconds. None of that guarantees that traders will make better decisions. The problem is reversing: soon every trader will have too many stocks to look at, and the advantage will come from knowing which ones to ignore.
You do not need 100 good-looking charts every week. You need a small number that fit what you are trying to do, and a sense of which deserve attention now and which can be left for later. A good screener should help create that priority. If it helps get from 2,500 stocks to that small list, it has done something useful.
If it simply gives you another 100 names to think about, it has only made the market noisier.
CA Harshitha Iyer and Pranjal Rastogi are co-founders of Smart Money Club. Wealth Vidhya is a SEBI Registered Research Analyst (INH000028352). Views are personal. Investments in the securities market are subject to market risks. Read all related documents carefully before investing.
