The biggest limit to investment return is not so much money as available time. We are probably all guilty of failing to recognise how key it is to focus the limited time available on finding and following the stocks with the optimum risk/return possibility.
Often "stock screening methods" don't get a lot of separate discussion, but they are implicit in what most people do and often not well thought through. For instance, for many people "stock screening" will start by following the posts of their favourite ShareTrader posters, their brokers newsletter or a magazine/newspaper article.
Within NZ, it is a pretty casual exercise to screen the 170 or so listed stocks. For starters, lots of people would cut them down to only the most liquid and largest market cap - something akin to the top 50. After that, it is not too hard to keep tabs on the lot of them and decide which most appeal. At this point, investors will have personal preferences as to what sort of investments they prefer - yield, growth, value, management, chart (price and volume history), etc.
However, get to any larger pool (e.g. ASX) and the really committed investor/trader will tend to have some larger system. This could be "bottom up" (i.e. looking for companies that meet the right criteria and then deciding whether they look interesting) or "top down" (starting with countries/sectors and looking for best prospects).
At company level, some will use scanning software to rapidly identify changes in price and volume and then buy (and sell) off the chart, perhaps knowing nothing about the company or business. Others will start by searching databases or tables for certain ratios - P/E (price/earnings ratio) has been the historical favourite for finding value.
One of the problems with investment is that a lot of investors looking at the same measures will tend to create a more efficient market in that area and the measure will stop working. For instance, if everyone looks for low P/E stocks as a screening tool, then low P/E stocks will tend to rapidly get picked up and analysed closely. Therefore P/E's are less likely to become depressed for no reason.
Another problem is that it is all very well identifying a measure you wish to use to screen stocks, but then you have to find a database or scanning tool that can find all stocks meeting that measure. So for most small investors, any first stage screening of stock databases is limited to quite commonly available data published in tables by the likes of NBR and IRG in NZ or by the AFR in Australia.
I mostly use fundamental tools for screening stocks (and use charts, badly, to time entries and exits when I have sufficient time free), but find different "tools" tend to be best for different phases of the business cycle/different markets. To get to the data I really want, I have to create it myself - something I can only keep up to date for about 100 stocks, so it is a pretty limited screening tool by that stage and relies on my limited pool having been well selected from the larger pool.
I go back to complete share tables a couple of times a year and sort by basic parameters to try and pick up any new shares I should add to my analysis, but the majority of my first stage screening still comes by reading something someone else has written or randomly checking out an interesting looking Stock Exchange announcement.
Referring back to your query again though, presuming you have decided on a "top down" screening and now want to distinguish between individual stocks in a sector, then it will depend a little how many stocks you need to cut your list down to before you look through in depth. If you need to quickly get rid of 90% of stocks, then I would suggest you could take a share table and run a ruler through the 25% that traded the lowest value over the past week. Then maybe a ruler through any with double digit % price declines in the last week (a safe move for a beginner anyway). After that, you might decide to take out lowest market cap or sort by div yield, Pr/NTA or P/E or simply race through the charts to spot ones that look most positive (obviously need to know a little about this area first).
Once you've got down to the 5-10 stocks you think you have enough time to analyse in depth, then it will come down to looking for your desired combo of value, growth and market sentiment. There are loads and loads of tools out there. There's a good thread called "PE Ratio" that covers some of the more sophisticated fundamental methods. However, once again, many of these will require so much time spent on each stock, that if you have not selected the right stocks in the first place, you will soon be mired in the slough of investor despond!
In the end, using your precious time will always come down to a compromise between number of stocks followed and depth of analysis on each stock followed. At their best, forums allow us to pool some of that analysis so as to increase both aspects. At their worst, they distract us from both....