Finding biggest stock rebounds requires a screener

— -- Q: How do I find stocks in the Standard & Poor's 500 that rose the most since the market bottomed on March 9, 2009?

A: You're not using these words. But, what you're asking for are instructions on how to build a custom stock screen.

Stock screens are tools used by investors to sift thousands of stocks to find the ones that meet certain criteria. Stock screens are commonly used by financial analysts, investors and journalists to pinpoint stocks that have certain traits.

Some websites provide free screening tools. USATODAY.com's Money section, for instance, offers a screening tool that helps you screen stocks for mostly short-term price characteristics. There are also robust screeners for mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

MSN Money's screener allows you to screen based on some fundamental data.

But neither lets you pull in the value of stocks on a specific date in the past.

There are ways to pull stock prices into a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel. Microsoft provides a free tool available here. But getting historical prices is a bit complicated. Some have figured out a way to pull historical stock quotes into Excel, as described here. If you're interested in these avenues, they're a bit complicated, so hang in there. If there's interest in finding out more about this, let me know, and I can do more in a future column.

For now, I'll save you the trouble of screening yourself. Using Standard & Poor's Capital IQ, I generated the list at left.

Matt Krantz is a financial markets reporter at USA TODAY and author of Investing Online for Dummies. He answers a different reader question every weekday in his Ask Matt column at money.usatoday.com. To submit a question, e-mail Matt at mkrantz@usatoday.com. Click here to see previous Ask Matt columns. Follow Matt on Twitter at: twitter.com/mattkrantz