How to Screen Colombo Stock Exchange Stocks with CeylonCharts

The Colombo Stock Exchange lists close to 300 companies. Nobody can flip through every chart every day, so a screener does the first pass for you. You describe what you’re looking for, such as “stocks in an uptrend that are beating most of the market,” and it returns the short list worth a closer look.

This guide walks through the CeylonCharts screener: how to open it, what each scan does, and how to build and read a first screen.

1. Open the screener

Open any chart on CeylonCharts. On the toolbar down the right-hand side of the chart, click the Screener button. The screener opens over the chart.

The numbers in the screener are calculated once per trading day, shortly after the market closes, from that day’s final prices. The date they refer to is shown at the top (“as of …”). Running a scan during the trading day gives you the previous session’s picture, not live prices.

2. Pick a scan

Across the top are six tabs. Each one shows only the filters relevant to it:

Filters combine with AND: a stock appears only if it passes every filter you’ve switched on.

3. Build your first screen: uptrend leaders

A classic starting point is to look for stocks that are in a long-term uptrend and outperforming most of the market.

1. Choose the Custom Filter tab.
2. Under Moving averages — price above, turn on EMA50 and EMA200. The stock must be trading above both its 50-day and 200-day exponential moving averages, which is a simple definition of an uptrend.
3. In RS Rating ≥, enter 80. That keeps only stocks whose price performance over the past year beats roughly 80% of rated CSE stocks.
4. Click Run scan.

What it returned on 25 September 2026

Here is the top of that list after the close on Friday, 25 September 2026, sorted by RS Rating:

Look at the last column. Serendib Land didn’t trade at all that day (volume −100% vs its average), and several others traded far below their usual volume. That’s the next lesson.

4. Read the results critically

A screener gives you candidates to study, not stocks to buy. A few things to check before you trust a row:

• Liquidity. Thinly traded stocks can post big moves on tiny volume, which inflates price-based measures like the RS Rating. Check the volume columns, or add a volume condition, before taking a high rating at face value.
• Price level. A stock trading at LKR 0.70 moves in 10-cent steps, which is 14% at a time. Percentage changes on very low-priced shares are noisy.
• The chart. Click any symbol to open its chart. Is the uptrend steady, or one spike? Is the RS Line (the stock’s price divided by the All Share Price Index) rising? A rising RS Line means the stock is still outperforming the market.
• The fundamentals. A strong price trend says nothing about whether the business is cheap or expensive. Open the Financials view from the chart to see revenue, profit and the balance sheet. Our guide to P/E, P/BV and dividend yield explains what to look for.

5. Other screens worth trying

• Pullbacks in an uptrend: on MA Scan, require price above EMA200 and within ±3% of EMA50. These are stocks in a long-term uptrend that have dipped back to their medium-term average.
• New highs: on 52W Scan, turn on 52W High. Then check which of them are breaking out on above-average volume.
• Unusual volume: on Volume Scan, set vs SMA50 ≥ % to 100 to find stocks trading at more than twice their normal volume. Heavy volume often comes before, or confirms, a significant move.
• Laggards: on Relative Performance, look at the bottom of the RS ranking to see which stocks and sectors the market is avoiding.

How the numbers are calculated

The RS Rating is a 1–99 ranking of each stock’s weighted price change over the past 3, 6, 9 and 12 months, with the latest quarter counting double. Stocks need at least 253 trading sessions of history to get one. The moving averages, RSI, 52-week levels and volume flags are all computed from daily CSE data. The Methodology page has the exact formulas.