Advice on building equity screening tool and sources of credible macrodata

Hi WSO,

I've been investing my own money (mainly ETF's, some individual stocks and bit of trading for the sake of entertainment) throughout my studies for a few years, and finally had the time/energy to take a little more disciplined approach to it.

The goal is to create a screening tool, which further filters candidates that might be worth looking into more detail/do fundamental analysis, or at least get rid of the weakest stocks. I'm aware that screening tools exist and the challenge of seeking to create alpha, but part of this project is just interest and an attempt to delve myself a bit deeper. All though I'm mainly asking for advice/feedback on the tool & metrics used, recommendation about existing screening tools and sources of data (company specific & especially strong macro data) are more than welcome.

So far, I've chosen 18 metrics from four segments (valuation, profitability, growth, risk) that would serve as proxies in the journey towards a sensible model. I've tried to select metrics that would fundamentally drive value (ROIC, for example), but selection is subject to limited data & knowledge as well. All of the stocks will be assessed on these criteria, then the criteria is aggregated into segment score (for each four segments), and then finally the total ranking of the stock. Ranking of the metric will be done through placing the stocks on deciles. Obviously the weight that is assessed to each criteria and segment is crucial in this coarse model and it is still under way (35/25/25/15 for valuation/profitability/growth/risk for example). Industry & geographic allocation would be based on human decisions at this point.

**Valuation (35%) **(P/E, P/B, EBIT/EV, Dividend yield)

**Profitability (25%) **(FCFF/EV, ROIC,ROE 3yr median, Gross margin, Operating margin)

**Growth (25%) **(Operating income growth, Revenue growth, Net income growth)

**Risk (15%) **(Equity/Debt, Cash, Beta, Payout ratio (e.g below 80%?), Amount of Goodwill)

Would anyone care to share their $0.02 on the taken approach? (metrics, ranking & weights)