Finding companies with the criteria you want isn’t always easy. You could spend hours searching ticker after ticker, only to find companies which aren’t worthy of your hard earned cash. An easier way to navigate through this is by using high quality stock screeners. Screening helps investors narrow down companies to invest in based on their ability to meet every criteria selected.  Any company who misses even one of the criteria requirements will be filtered out.

This lets one easily choose ideal metrics. Screens are effective because they sift out bad stocks and only keep the cream of the crop in. It isn’t always easy to create an effective screen. Our Zacks Premium Screens have helped with this, bringing profits to many investors over time. Our predefined criteria are chosen carefully to capture special kinds of companies.

Today, we’ve dug up three mid cap stocks using one of our premium screens known as “Mid-Sized Stocks for Outsized Returns”. Some of the metrics of this screen is that the stock must have an average trading volume of at least 100,000 shares over the last 20 days, an annual EPS growth rate of at least 10% over the last five years, and expected earnings growth north of 10% this year. In addition to using the metrics on this great screen, I’ve added an additional metric which I feel is appropriate for investing in these stocks 

I screened for stocks with a Zacks Industry Rank of 75 or better. Stocks within the top half of the 265 different industries covered by Zacks outperform stocks from the bottom half by a factor of two to one, so it makes sense to screen for stocks from the upper echelon of all industries.  Let’s see what our modified premium screen has found for us today.

Abiomed Inc-(ABMD – Analyst Report)

Abiomed manufactures and sells medical products that assist or replace the pumping function in failing hearts. ABMD is a Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) and is also pretty liquid, as it has a current ratio of 7.48. The company’s EPS is projected to grow by 24.34% this year.