Most investors instinctively know the difference between growth and value stocks — but when it comes to actually screening for them, the line gets blurry fast. A stock with a P/E of 35 might be a bargain if it is growing earnings at 40% annually, or dramatically overpriced if growth is stalling. The screening filters you choose determine which side of that line you land on.
How to Define Growth Stocks in a Screener
Growth investors pay a premium today for earnings that have not arrived yet. That means your filters must confirm the business is genuinely accelerating, not just coasting on past momentum. The core metrics to screen are:
- Revenue growth (YoY) above 15% — ideally accelerating over the past 3 years, not decelerating
- EPS growth (YoY) above 20% — earnings should grow faster than revenue as margins expand
- Return on Equity (ROE) above 15% — confirms the business reinvests capital productively
- Gross margin above 40% — high-margin businesses have more room to fund growth internally
- PEG ratio below 2.0 — P/E divided by earnings growth rate; below 2 suggests the premium is at least partially justified
Avoid filtering on P/E alone when screening for growth stocks. A 50x P/E on a company growing earnings at 60% annually is more defensible than a 25x P/E on a company growing at 5%. Context is everything.
How to Define Value Stocks in a Screener
Value investors want to buy a dollar of earnings or assets for less than a dollar of market price. The challenge is separating genuinely cheap stocks from stocks that deserve to be cheap. Start with these filters:
- P/E below sector median — use relative valuation, not absolute cutoffs like P/E below 15
- P/B below 1.5 — particularly useful for financials, industrials, and asset-heavy businesses
- EV/EBITDA below 8 — better than P/E for comparing companies with different capital structures
- Debt-to-equity below 1.0 — cheap stocks with high debt are often cheap for a reason
- Free cash flow yield above 5% — confirms the company actually generates cash, not just accounting profits
The most reliable value screens combine at least two of these metrics simultaneously. A stock cheap on P/E but expensive on EV/EBITDA often has an unusual debt structure that explains the discrepancy.
Where Growth and Value Investing Overlap
The most disciplined investors do not treat growth and value as opposites. Every business is worth the discounted value of its future cash flows, and growth is simply one variable in that equation. In practice, this means looking for stocks that screen reasonably on both dimensions:
- Revenue growth of 10-20% (solid but not priced for perfection)
- P/E below 25, or PEG below 1.5
- ROE above 12%
- Net debt-to-EBITDA below 2.0
This blend — sometimes called GARP (Growth At a Reasonable Price) — tends to outperform pure growth in sideways markets and pure value in bull markets. It is also less sensitive to the rate environment that has whipsawed high-multiple growth stocks since 2022.
Why Sector Context Changes Everything
A P/E of 20 means very different things depending on sector. Technology companies typically trade at 25-40x earnings because investors expect sustained high growth. Banks and utilities trade at 8-14x because growth is slow and predictable. Before labeling any stock cheap or expensive, compare it against sector peers, not the broad market average.
- Technology and software: Growth screen thresholds apply — revenue growth above 15%, gross margin above 50%
- Financials and utilities: Value screen thresholds apply — P/B below 1.5, dividend yield above 2.5%
- Healthcare and consumer discretionary: GARP blend works best
- Energy and materials: Cycle-aware value metrics — EV/EBITDA relative to 5-year historical average
Running a growth screen on a utility stock will return nothing useful. Applying a P/E below 15 filter to software stocks will eliminate almost every quality name in the sector.
Building Your Screening Workflow
A practical approach is to run two parallel screens — one growth-oriented and one value-oriented — then manually review the overlap. Stocks appearing on both lists are often the most interesting candidates: cheap enough to offer a margin of safety, growing fast enough that the cheap price is not a warning sign.
Start broad to get a workable universe of 50-150 stocks, then tighten individual criteria. For growth screens, add a revenue acceleration filter — verify that the most recent quarter's growth rate is higher than the prior year's rate. For value screens, add a 52-week price filter to avoid catching a falling knife, looking for stocks within 20-30% of their 52-week high rather than at multi-year lows.
DeltaScreener lets you combine fundamental filters across both strategies in a single screen, so you can run this two-pronged approach without exporting data to spreadsheets. Build both screens at deltascreener.com/screener and compare the results — the overlap between a quality growth list and a disciplined value list is often where the best risk-adjusted opportunities are hiding.