How To Use KLSE Screener Like A Whiz [with Examples!]

Everybody wants to have an edge when it comes to investing. 

It could be your extensive network of finance gurus and mentors; it could be the depth of specialized insights that you’ve amassed over the years; Or maybe, it might even be your lucky socks.

For me, it is KLSE Screener — a free online tool that provides stock fundamentals data of the Malaysia Stock Market at your fingertips.

The app is completely free. It makes money by displaying ads, like really tiny ones at the bottom of your screen that makes me question if they’re even effective at all. Not that I’m complaining.

Despite being a free app, it’s jam-packed with plenty of neat features that every investor can benefit from. I’m just sad they don’t have any referral program because I always sing so highly of it.

But alas, it doesn’t come without its own problems.

When I first started using it, I felt that the app uses too many abbreviations, leaving out a handful of small but important details. It’ll leave you wondering about things like “Is it denoted in RM? Or cent? Is it per share? Or per lot?” And I think we can all agree that adding or taking away two zeros from a number can be quite substantial on your returns.

So, I wanted to write a piece that helps to reduce the misinformation that circles around the app while strengthening my own understanding. This is NOT a comprehensive investing guide. Instead, it’s more of a basic introduction to the user interface of KLSE Screener. A KLSE Screen guide, if you will.

Now before we start going into the nitty-gritty details, I just wanted to say that everything I say here is of my own personal opinion and is not financial advice. As always, I recommend doing your own due diligence.

Enjoy.

Getting To Know KLSE Screener

Let’s tackle the juicy bits first. We’ll be looking at the stocks metrics and abbreviations that KLSE Screener uses.

To make explanation easier, we are using AIRASIA stock as a case study, but for no particular reasons other than the fact that it is the first one that comes to mind.

1. Stock / Ticker Symbol
2. Share Price
3. Price Movement Indicator
4. High / Low
5. Bid / Ask
6. Vol
7. B/S (Volume)
8. Fundamentals
9. Historical Chart
10. Rolling 4 Quarters
11. Earning Per Share
12. PE Ratio
13. Net Tangible Asset (NTA)
14. Return on Equity (ROE) Ratio
15. Dividend Per Share
16. Dividend Yield
17. 52 Week’s Share Price
18. Market Capitalization
19. Shares Outstanding
20. Par Value
21. Profit Performance Marker
22. Revenue Performance Marker

Stock / Ticker Symbol

A stock symbol is a fast and accurate way to uniquely identify securities for trading purposes. Like a nickname.

Back in the days, people had to shout out the full company name when they refer to a certain stock. Imagine if two companies had almost identical stock names but are absolutely not affiliated with each other, like CIT Group Inc. and Citigroup Inc. That smells like trouble, doesn’t it? Thankfully, stock symbols are here to stop us from buying the wrong stock.

Besides, as the number of securities grew and grew, it became a very tedious task to memorize the full name of all the securities. I, myself, can barely remember what I ate last night, let alone memorizing a list of company names in full. Hence, stock symbols are usually the preferred way to refer to a stock.

Share Price

Share price is how much the financial security is currently being valued at.

In our mock example, the share price is 0.585. This means that each share is worth RM 0.585, with heavy emphasis on the word “each share”.

Generally speaking, the minimum order quantity is one round lot, which is equivalent to one hundred shares. By that logic, the minimum amount that we need to invest is RM 58.5 (RM 0.585 * 100 shares), not just RM 0.585.

Price Movement Indicator

The price movement indicator tracks how much the share price has fluctuated within the day.

This is helpful for investors who want to keep track of price swings. It shows us how much any given stock has appreciated or depreciated within the day.

For example, if the share price is 0.52 at 9 am, and then goes up to 0.585 at 10 am, then the market price movement would be +0.065 (+12.50%).

High / Low

High/Low is pretty self-explanatory. They are referring to the highest or lowest share price transacted within the day.

If we are seeing a “Low” at 0.51 and “High” at 0.59, it means that on that particular day, someone had successfully bought or sold their share at the lowest price of RM 0.51 per share.

Similarly, someone also managed to buy or sell theirs at the highest price of RM 0.59 per share on the very same day.

Bid / Ask

While Share Price and High / Low tells us what is the most recent or highest and lowest price that have been successfully transacted, Bid / Ask tells us about the ongoing offers for the share.

Whenever we want to buy a share, we have to let the stock exchange know (i) how many shares we want to buy and (ii) how much we want to pay for each share. The bid price is the highest price an investor is willing to pay for a share. It represents the demand side of the market for a given stock.

Similarly, when we want to sell our shares, we also have to let the stock exchange know (i) how many shares we want to sell and (ii) how much we want to sell them for. The ask price is the lowest price at which an existing shareholder is willing to part with their shares. It represents the supply side of the market for a given stock.

For example, if Billy and Buck want to buy a stock at RM 0.60 and RM 0.61 respectively but Selena and Sam are only willing to part with their shares at RM 0.66 and RM 0.64, then the Bid/Ask would be 0.61/0.64.

Vol

Vol, abbreviated for volume, is the quantity of shares that have exchanged hands within the day. With this, we can get a feel of how active this stock is being traded and thus deduce information like its liquidity and etc.

In our case study, a total of 29,459,400 shares have been traded today alone, and it’s only 12.05 pm! It makes me drool thinking just how much brokerage fees BURSA is making from all these trades.

B/S (Volume)

I have a confession.

I can’t seem to figure this thing out even after spending hours on Google. But… I have a hunch it’s about how many people are trying to buy / sell the stocks. Just maybe.

For example, AIRASIA’s share price is currently priced at RM 0.585. We feel that it’s too expensive and is only willing to pay RM 0.520. So, we submit our buy offer at RM 0.520 and wait for an existing shareholder who is willing to part with their shares at RM 0.520. Until that happens, our buy offer remains standing.

I’m assuming that B/S Volume is referring the number of buy / sell offers (or number of shares) that are currently NOT matched.

Fundamental

We’ll find some of the most commonly used data for fundamental analysis. Numbers and figures, basically. *sUcH deSCriPtIve, VeRY wOw, mUch fAscInaTe.*

Fundamental analysis is the method of assessing a business’s intrinsic value by looking at its financial metrics. Through these numbers, we are hoping to gain insights on how the business is currently performing along with its future prospect.

If we believe that the business should be worth a lot more than the current share price, then perhaps the security is currently being undervalued by the market.

In that case, we can capitalize on the mismatch by investing into the business now, and selling when the share price more accurately reflects the worth of the business.

Historical Chart

This shows us historical charts of the share’s price, going as far back as 10 years ago. We get to view the price history in 3 different formats, namely:

• Zoomable Static Chart (Default format. Basically an excel graph)
• Interactive Charting (Candlestick charts. Useful for technical trading)
• 30 Days Historical Prices (Tabulated format)

Rolling 4 Quarters

The term, rolling four quarters, is just a fancy word for the most recently ended four consecutive fiscal quarters.

Let’s say that if our company starts its financial year on the 1st of December every year, then this would be the breakdown of its quarters in the financial year 2021.

• First Quarter FY2021 (1st Dec 2020 – 28th Feb 2021)
• Second Quarter FY2021 (1st Mar 2021 – 31st May 2021)
• Third Quarter FY2021 (1st Jun 2021 – 31st Aug 2021)
• Fourth Quarter FY2021 (1st Sep 2021 – 30th Nov 2021)

However, if we are looking at this company’s fundamental statistics on the 20th of November 2021, the 4th Quarter of 2021 hasn’t officially ended yet. All the company data pertaining to this particular Quarter has not been compiled nor published.

So instead, we would include the previous year’s 4th Quarter for our analysis, i.e the rolling four quarters. In other words, it would include data from…

• Fourth Quarter FY2020 (1st Sep 2020 – 30th Nov 2020)
• First Quarter FY2021 (1st Dec 2020 – 28th Feb 2021)
• Second Quarter FY2021 (1st Mar 2021 – 31st May 2021)
• Third Quarter FY2021 (1st Jun 2021 – 31st Aug 2021)

Note that the fourth quarter comes from the previous financial year to make up the one year cycle.

Earning Per Share

Earning per share (EPS) is literally what it means — the company’s earnings for every common share it has outstanding. It’s commonly used as a surface-level indicator of a company’s profitability.

For example, we know that (a) AIRASIA has 3,341,000,000 common stock in the stock market and (b) it made a loss of RM 321,897,000 in the rolling 4 quarters. This is how we can calculate our EPS.

What the EPS is telling us is that AIRASIA made RM 0.0963 of losses this financial year for every share that they have outstanding.

By the way, did you happen to notice that the EPS value in KLSE Screener is showing -9.63 instead of -0.0963? This is because the EPS is denominated in cents instead of Ringgit. So to be more precise, KLSE Screener should’ve written it as 9.63 cent per share, ergo RM 0.0963 per share instead.

An important note is that earnings per share do not automatically mean that we, as an individual investor, are entitled to the profit made.

While EPS does indeed measure the profit that the company made for each share, the board of directors will get the final say of how much profit they want to distribute to the individual shareholders.

If they choose not to distribute any (which they can), the company gets to keep all of its earnings. Even when they do decide to distribute dividends, it will usually only be a fraction of the total earnings.

PE Ratio

Literal to the name, the price to earnings ratio (PE Ratio) is basically the price an investor is willing to pay for the company’s earnings.

It is extremely similar to earnings per share (EPS) because it also gives us a glimpse into the company’s overall profitability, except it takes into consideration the price of each share.

Consider this hypothetical scenario.

If a company has 1000 shares outstanding and it made a net profit of RM 10,000 this year, that would mean it has an EPS of RM 10. In other words, this company made RM 10 for every share, which may sound very attractive at first glance.

But what if I told you that the share price is RM 2000 each? Would you pay RM 2000 to “theoretically” make RM 10 — an equivalent of 0.5%? I guess not.

The price we have to pay for a share has a direct influence on the perceived earning prowess of the company. Unlike EPS, this effect is captured in a PE Ratio, and thus, can be a better indicator for the company’s profitability.

To calculate the PE Ratio, we just need to divide the price per share by its earnings per share. Let’s try that with AIRASIA’s data.

Note that the EPS of 9.63 reflected in KLSE Screener is denoted in cents and we have to convert it to RM first, hence RM 0.0963.

A PE Ratio of -6.07 means that if we divide up all the outstanding shares, investors are willing to pay (or have paid) RM 6.07 in order to own a slice of a company that made them a loss of RM 1 for that financial year. Yeah, it wasn’t a particularly great year for AIRASIA.

Anyway, just like EPS, the profits earned by the company do not automatically belong to the individual shareholder. The director gets to choose how much profit to distribute to its shareholders. So, PE Ratio won’t be able to tell us how much money our stake in the company will make us.

That said, it serves as an indicator of the faith other investors have in the growth of the company. The ratio tells us how much premium the other investors are willing to pay for every RM 1 that the company earns.

A high PE Ratio can mean that many investors are expecting a growth in the annual profitability of the company and therefore willing to pay a higher premium to get a piece of the pie. Vice versa.

Net Tangible Asset (NTA)

Net Tangible Asset, or NTA for short, refers to the value of physical things that we can touch and feel, like property, equipment, inventory, cash, and account receivables.

We can calculate the NTA as follows.

Yikes. I’ll try my best to expand on these accounting jargons.

• Total assets is everything that the company owns.
• Intangible assets are things that we cannot touch or feel, i.e: intellectual property, goodwill, brand value etc.
• Liabilities are something that we have to pay back, i.e: loans, account payables.
• Par value of preferred stocks. Generally quite inconsequential for equity stocks, but you can read more about par value here.

By taking away all the liabilities and intangible stuff, we are able to isolate the physical assets. This is particular useful because these items have an easily quantifiable monetary value, i.e we can refer to the market price for property, equipment, etc. We can then easily use this information to estimate the company’s underlying worth.

I should clarify that we are not saying that intangible assets such as brand values, patents, etc don’t add value to businesses. In fact, it might even be indispensable for certain businesses. But these assets are difficult to put a price tag on. How do we say with exact confidence how much Coca Cola’s brand name is worth? It’s subjective.

So, NTA is really just a conservative way for us to put a cold hard number to estimate a company’s underlying net worth using items that can be easily sold off.

We can think of net tangible assets as the money that we, as the shareholder, can get if we sell off the entire company and then pay off all of its obligations.

Back to our AIRASIA case study. Here are some numbers that I’ve pulled out from their 2018 Annual Report.

Assets
Non-Current Asset	RM 9,731,920
Current Asset	RM 8,817,848
Intangible Asset	( RM 615,413 )
Liabilities
Non-Current Liabilities	( RM 5,514,148 )
Current Liabilities	( RM 6,850,358 )
Total Net Tangible Asset	RM 5,569,852

A snippet of the Assets and Liabilities of AIRASIA. The ringgit amount is denoted as RM 000's.

As shown above, we just need to add the non-current assets and current assets together, and then deduct the intangible assets, non-current liabilities, and current liabilities to get the total net tangible asset in RM value. That’s RM 5,569,852,000.

But we’re not done yet. AIRASIA’s case is a bit trickier because they have two types of investors, (a) individual investors like you and I, and (b) institutional investors.

The tangible assets have to be distributed proportionally to their stakes in the company. From what I managed to find, these institutional investors own 20.54% of AIRASIA as non-controlling interest, which follows that we only have claims on 79.46% of the total net tangible assets. That sums up to RM 4,425,804,000.

Again, from the 2018 Annual Report.

Non-Controlling Interest (NCI)	RM 1,599,189	21%
Controlling Interest (CI)	RM 6,185,265	79%
Total Shareholder's Fund	RM 7,784,454	100%
NTA for NCI	RM 1,144,048	21%
NTA for CI	RM 4,425,804	79%
Total NTA	RM 5,569,852	100%

The ringgit amount is denoted as RM 000's.

So yes, RM 4,425,804,000 of NTA “belongs” to us.

But this is such an astronomical value. They don’t tell you that, but KLSE Screener has decided to display not the NTA, but the NTA per share instead, you know, for simplicity sake. Simply divide the NTA by the number of outstanding share to get the final NTA of RM 1.33 per share.

Phew! This metric took me a while to calculate manually. But it goes to show how accurate and convenient the KLSE Screener app is. I’m feeling a sudden urge to give a big hug to whoever that created the app.

Return on Equity (ROE) Ratio

Return on Equity (ROE) ratio is calculated by dividing a company’s net income by its net tangible asset. It is a metric that helps to gauge how efficient the company is using their asset to generate profits.

Consider 2 companies in the same industry looking to expand their production line.

Company A spent RM 1,000,000 to acquire a factory, renovate, hire workers, purchase raw materials, manufacture, and finally sell the products to their customers. They made RM 250,000 of earnings this year through their expansion.

On the other hand, Company B did the exact same thing and managed to make the same amount of earnings, except that they needed RM 2,000,000. Maybe the factory they bought is more expensive, maybe they needed more workers because their manufacturing process is not as efficient, maybe they couldn’t sell as much product as they’d like… Doesn’t matter.

At the end of the day, Company A came out ahead because they are more efficient with their resources.

As an investor, I always want to know if the company is squeezing the most value out of every penny I put into the company. Essentially, a comparatively high ROE means that the company knows how to get a bigger bang for my buck, and with that line of thought, the company should theoretically outperform others in terms of growth, given that everything else is equal.

In our AIRASIA example, here’s how we would get the ROE Ratio.

Dividend Per Share

The word, dividend, is like music to my ear.

Whenever a company makes a profit, the board of directors can decide whether to reinvest that surplus money for more growth, or distribute them in the form of dividend to reward their shareholders for providing them the capital to run the business.

Dividend per share (DPS) refers to the profits that a company distributes to each of its outstanding shares over the past 12 months period. It gives the investors an idea as to how much money they can make when they invest in a given company.

Let’s take a look at AIRASIA.

Over the year 2018, they have issued two dividends. (We can find these data on the Dividends tabs on the app.)

• RM 0.12 per share on the 13th July 2018.
• RM 0.40 per share on the 28th December 2018.

If we sum them up, that equates to a RM 0.52 dividend per share for the 3,341,974,000 common shares outstanding in the year 2018. Working backwards, it meant that the board of directors of AIRASIA have decided to evenly distribute a staggering amount of RM 1,737,827,000 to all of its shareholders in year 2018 alone.

Depending on how big of a shareholder we are, we would be entitled to our respective portion of that sweet, sweet dividend!

Dividend Yield

Sometimes, dividends per share don’t give us the full picture.

While it’s nice to know that the company paid RM 0.52 in dividend per share, we don’t know the price we need to pay for each share. If one share costs us RM 20, then the dividends are only 2.6%. We need to take the share price into consideration to gauge its profitability.

This is where dividend yield might come in handy. Dividend yield is expressed as the dividend per share divided by its share price.

Let’s look at our case study. We’ve established the fact that AIRASIA did give out RM 0.52 dividend per share in the financial year 2018. During that time, each share was hovering at about RM 2.00. Here’s how I would calculate the dividend yield.

Bonkers. We are getting back 26% of our money in dividend on that year alone. Dividends aren’t normally this high, but from what I know, AIRASIA did distribute them in a form of special dividend. I couldn’t believe my eyes when writing this article. I had to do some verification to confirm my math, but this article from The Edge Market and also this article from The Star seem to agree. P.S: The dividend in 2019 is even crazier.

Like I say, gotta love that sweet, sweet dividend.

52 Week’s Share Price

The 52w in KLSE Screener is just a quick glance at the share price for the last 52 weeks (it’s basically one year).

From our AIRASIA case study, we can see that in the previous 52 weeks, the share price went down to RM 0.50 lows at one point, and went up to RM 2.15 highs at another. If we pull up the historical chart, that’s exactly what happened.

I personally look at this indicator as a measure of the price volatility of the company. If the discrepancies is really large like in this example, something must have gone REALLY right, or REALLY wrong for the company, and I’d have to do my due diligence to find out why.

Pro Tip: If you’re wondering why isn’t this structured as 48 weeks (because 12 months * 4 weeks), here’s an awesome Quora post that will blow your mind away. Spoiler alert: One day is only 23 hours 56 minutes and 4 seconds long.

Market Capitalization

Market capitalization, or short as “Capital” in KLSE Screener, is the market value of the company’s outstanding shares. We calculate that by multiplying the number of shares to its share price, as follows:

Since the shares of a publicly listed company are traded in the public stock exchange markets, market cap can be thought of as the public’s opinion of a company’s net worth.

Shares Outstanding

Shares outstanding tells us the total amount of share that the company has issued.

3,341 mil means that the company has 3,341,000,000 common shares outstanding.

It’s worth pointing out that this figure is not the exact number. If we look into the annual report of the company, the exact outstanding share should have been 3,341,974,000 shares.

Not the end of the world, but I just thought that maybe you might want to know.

I suppose that KLSE Screener had to round the figure down because otherwise it would’ve taken up too much space. But from what I know, KLSE Screener still uses the accurate number (3,341,974,000 in this case) to calculate the other related financial ratios. They just don’t display the full number. So rest assured that whatever calculations that we are seeing is accurate.

Par Value

Par value is basically the minimum price of a security. The company that issues the securities is legally not allowed to issue any further securities below the par value that they have decided.

This way, when and if the company does issue more securities at par value, investors know for sure that this will be the best price anyone is ever gonna get for this particular company’s securities.

For bonds, the par value represents the bond’s worth at its maturity date. If we bought a bond from Company A for RM 100, it means that we can redeem the RM 100 from the issuing company when the bond matures, along with whatever interest payment that the bond yielded. So if we’re buying bonds, then yes, look into the par value.

For stocks, however, the par value is somewhat of an irrelevant and outdated concept. As far as I know, we don’t have to worry about this because what’s important to us is the market value of the share. As the stocks are constantly being traded throughout the day, the market gets to decide how much it’s worth, not the par value. Most shares typically will have either no par value or very low par value, like 1 cent, to avoid any potential legal liability if the stock drops below its par value.

Profit Performance Marker

These are visual markers to help us understand the profit growth of the company. I like to think of them as boy scout badges that is given out to scouts who accomplished a certain tasks.

• YoY = Year over Year profit growth
• QoQ = 2 Quarter over Quarter profit growth 
• ConQ = 3 Continuous Quarter profit growth
• TopQ = Latest quarter profit is 2 years high

Revenue Performance Marker

Similar to the above, except it tracks the top line sales revenue instead of the profit.

• YoY = Year over Year revenue growth
• QoQ = 2 Quarter over Quarter revenue growth 
• ConQ = 3 Continuous Quarter revenue growth
• TopQ = Latest quarter revenue is 2 years high

Just My 2 Cents

You’re a champ if you made it through the ~4,500 words in this article.

It took a long time to write but I hope that this piece has been helpful. Feel free to leave a comment down below if I missed out on any details.

Until then, keep hustling!