What Is CAN SLIM? William O'Neil's Seven-Letter Stock Method
CAN SLIM is a stock-selection checklist created by William O'Neil, founder of Investor's Business Daily, that looks for fast-rising earnings, a new catalyst, strong demand for the shares and group leadership. Its last letter adds a test outside the stock: buy only when the overall market is in an uptrend.
Growth-stock investing has plenty of rules of thumb. CAN SLIM is the one with an acronym, a newspaper behind it and decades of use, which is why it still appears as a preset or a tutorial on nearly every stock screener.
How it works
Each letter is one test, and a candidate is meant to pass all seven. The definitions below follow William O’Neil’s method as summarized by Investor’s Business Daily, the paper he launched in 1984 as Investor’s Daily, and in his book How to Make Money in Stocks. The exact numbers vary between sources and screens, so treat them as common guidelines rather than fixed law.
- C, current quarterly earnings. Earnings per share in the latest quarter up sharply against the same quarter a year earlier. O’Neil’s guideline is commonly given as at least 25%. Some published screens, such as the American Association of Individual Investors’ version, use a lower bar.
- A, annual earnings increases. Earnings growing year after year, commonly 25% or more a year over the last three years, often paired with a high return on equity.
- N, new. Something new driving the business: a product, a service, new management or a change in the industry. In chart terms, the stock is emerging from a base toward new price highs.
- S, supply and demand. Evidence that buyers are absorbing the available shares, chiefly heavy trading on up days. Early versions also favored a smaller share count, since a limited float moves further on the same demand.
- L, leader or laggard. Owning the strongest stocks in the strongest groups, measured by relative price strength against the rest of the market over the past year.
- I, institutional sponsorship. Growing ownership by funds and other large institutions, whose buying provides the sustained demand behind big moves.
- M, market direction. The overall market in a confirmed uptrend. O’Neil’s point was that most stocks follow the market, so a stock passing the first six tests can still fall in a declining one.
Three kinds of test in seven letters
The letters split into three kinds of test. C and A are fundamental and easy to screen. N, S, L and I describe the stock’s behavior and its buyers, and only partly screen well. M looks outside the stock entirely, at the indexes.
A worked example
Running the two earnings letters on a hypothetical company.
C: earnings per share were $0.80 in last year’s second quarter and $1.04 in this year’s. The change is ($1.04 − $0.80) ÷ $0.80 = 30%, which clears a 25% guideline.
A: annual earnings per share over four years went $2.00, $2.60, $3.30 and $4.20. The yearly growth rates are 30.0%, 26.9% and 27.3% ($2.60 ÷ $2.00, $3.30 ÷ $2.60, $4.20 ÷ $3.30), so all three years clear 25%.
The remaining letters are checks, not arithmetic. Is there a named new product or catalyst (N)? Is volume heavier on up days than down days (S)? Is the stock among the top performers in its industry group (L)? Are fund holdings rising quarter to quarter (I)? And are the major indexes trending up (M)?
A company can pass C and A and still fail the method. If the market is in a correction, M says wait, however good the earnings look. That is the letter most screens leave out, because no single filter on a stock’s own data can express it.
The original data
This channel’s CAN SLIM tutorial is a measurable test of what the topic draws. The video, “Finviz Tutorial [CanSlim Screener Settings]”, published on 16 Mar 2021 and runs 4:11. In the channel’s YouTube Studio lifetime export dated 11 Aug 2026, it had 12,390 views, ranking 140th of the 498 videos in the export, whose median is 3,293 views. The Finviz rows are published as the Finviz video data download.
Among the channel’s 7 Finviz videos it ranks second, a little behind “22 Premium Finviz Scanner Settings” at 12,729 views. Newer Finviz videos from 2026 had between 2,660 and 4,070 views at the export date, though they had also been live for only a few months.
Who stayed after the tutorial
The stronger signal is who stayed. The video gained 173 subscribers, 14.0 for every 1,000 views. Across all 498 videos in the same export the figure is 6.1 per 1,000, so this short tutorial converted viewers at more than twice the channel’s overall rate. It drew 82,054 impressions at a 6.77% click-through rate, above the 6.25% median across the export’s videos, and the average view lasted 1:46, 42.3% of its length.
In the video itself, the saved CAN SLIM screen on Finviz returned 46 stocks in the video published 16 Mar 2021, and 36 once a minimum share price was added. That count describes one screen on one day in March 2021, not a standing figure. Wider demand is thin in titles: in the site’s 24,971-video finance search study, 3 titles name CAN SLIM, from 3 channels, and the most watched, a summary of O’Neil’s book, has 172,289 views while the other two have fewer than 30 between them.
When it fails
It fails when the screen is mistaken for the method. A screener can filter earnings growth and price strength. It cannot judge whether a product is genuinely new, and it rarely checks the market’s trend. A list of stocks that passes C and A is a starting point, not a CAN SLIM pick.
It fails in a falling market. Growth stocks with the best earnings are often the most crowded, and they can drop hardest when the indexes turn. Ignoring M is the most common way to use the method and lose with it.
It fails when the thresholds are copied without the context. A 25% earnings jump from a depressed year, a one-off tax gain, or a share count shrunk by buybacks can all pass the arithmetic while saying little about the business.
It fails on execution. O’Neil paired selection with firm buying rules, such as buying near a proper base, and firm selling rules, including a fixed maximum loss. Using only the selection half leaves the trades with no exit plan.
And it fails when a checklist replaces judgment on price. A company can pass all seven letters and still be bought too far above its base, where an ordinary pullback does real damage.
Related
A growth stock is the kind of company CAN SLIM is built to find, and that page covers how growth is usually measured. The stock screener page explains what filters can and cannot express, which matters most for N and M. The cup and handle is the base O’Neil most associated with a proper buy point. And the guide to using Finviz shows where the earnings and performance filters sit on the platform.
I treat CAN SLIM as a shopping list, not a buy signal. The screen gives me names with the earnings; the chart and the market decide whether any of them get bought this week, and when the market itself is in a downtrend, the list waits.
— Michael Whitman
This page is educational, not financial advice. Test every idea on your own charts before risking money.