What is O'Neil's CAN SLIM No Float Screen?
O'Neil's CAN SLIM No Float Screen is a variant of the growth strategy William J. O'Neil built and popularized through Investor's Business Daily, the newspaper he founded in 1983, and his book How to Make Money in Stocks. O'Neil ran the research firm William O'Neil & Co. and spent years cataloguing what the market's best-performing stocks had in common before they took off. The result was CAN SLIM, an acronym covering Current earnings, Annual earnings, New highs, Supply and demand, Leadership, Institutional sponsorship, and Market direction. This screen keeps that framework but removes one constraint — the limit on a company's float.
Everything else that defines the method stays in place. The No Float version still blends hard fundamentals with price behavior, so it reads as both a growth screen and a momentum screen at once, and it still insists on accelerating profits confirmed by a stock trading near its highs.
The core idea
O'Neil's premise is that winners announce themselves through the income statement and the price chart at the same time. On the fundamental side, he wanted current quarterly earnings rising quickly and rising faster than they did a quarter earlier, sitting on top of a multi-year record of annual gains. On the technical side, he wanted proof that buyers already agreed: strong relative strength versus the rest of the market, a price close to its 52-week high, and institutions on the register. A stock that clears both sets of tests is, in O'Neil's terms, a leader rather than a laggard.
The point of screening this way is timing. Rather than buy an out-of-favor company and wait, O'Neil chased firms whose numbers were inflecting right now. He argued that a stock looking expensive and extended more often keeps climbing, while the one that looks cheap keeps sinking — so the filter deliberately favors strength over apparent bargains.
What O'Neil's CAN SLIM No Float Screen looks for
- Latest-quarter EPS from continuing operations (Q1) at least 20% above the year-ago quarter (Q5).
- The Q1-over-Q5 growth rate must exceed the earlier Q2-over-Q6 growth rate, so the pace of improvement is still rising.
- Positive EPS from continuing operations in both of the two most recent quarters (Q1 and Q2).
- A five-year growth rate in EPS from continuing operations of at least 25%.
- EPS from continuing operations up in each of the past five fiscal years, plus a trailing-12-month figure no lower than the most recent full year.
- A share price no more than 10% below its 52-week high.
- 52-week relative strength ranking in the top 30% of the universe — a percentile rank above 70.
- Five or more institutional shareholders.
- Over-the-counter (OTC) stocks are left out.
What dropping the float rule changes
In the standard CAN SLIM screen, a company's float — the shares available to the public — has to sit below 20 million. That single line quietly turns the whole screen into a small-cap hunt, because only smaller firms carry a float that tight. The No Float version states no float requirement at all, and the practical effect is large.
The reasoning is partly historical. As companies have grown and share counts have swelled, a 20-million-share ceiling has become steadily harder to clear, quietly filtering out most of the market. O'Neil also never wrote that precise number into his book; the cap was an implementation choice layered on top of his ideas. Removing it lets big, liquid market leaders pass — the kind of established, heavily traded growth names the float rule would have blocked no matter how strong their earnings and relative strength. You give up the supply-and-demand advantage of a thin float, where a catalyst moves the price further, in exchange for a broader list that is no longer confined to micro- and small-cap companies.
What to keep in mind
Take away the float cap and you also take away part of the original edge. O'Neil's own research pointed to small share counts — most of his big winners had fewer than 25 million shares outstanding — precisely because scarce shares amplify a move. A screen open to large caps will surface steadier, more widely followed businesses, but the explosive re-rating that made the classic method famous is less likely from a company the whole market already owns. The momentum core still carries reversal risk: buying near the highs works until the trend breaks. And because the results skew toward names with heavy institutional ownership, some may already be late in their run rather than early.
Sources
How to Make Money in Stocks: A Winning System in Good Times and Bad, William J. O'Neil, McGraw-Hill.
American Association of Individual Investors (AAII) — Stock Investor Pro screen definition and commentary.