[fil-ter] 
| 1. | any substance, as cloth, paper, porous porcelain, or a layer of charcoal or sand, through which liquid or gas is passed to remove suspended impurities or to recover solids. |
| 2. | any device, as a tank or tube, containing such a substance for filtering. |
| 3. | any of various analogous devices, as for removing dust from air or impurities from tobacco smoke, or for eliminating certain kinds of light rays. |
| 4. | Informal. a filter-tipped cigarette or cigar. |
| 5. | Photography. a lens screen of dyed gelatin or glass for controlling the rendering of color or for diminishing the intensity of light. |
| 6. | Electronics, Physics. a circuit or device that passes certain frequencies and blocks others. |
| 7. | Mathematics. a collection of subsets of a topological space, having the properties that the intersection of two subsets in the collection is a subset in the collection and that any set containing a subset in the collection is in the collection. |
| 8. | to remove by the action of a filter. |
| 9. | to act as a filter for; to slow or partially obstruct the passage of: The thick leaves filtered the sunlight. |
| 10. | to pass through or as through a filter. |
| 11. | to pass or slip through slowly, as through an obstruction or a filter: Enemy agents managed to filter into the embattled country. |
| fil·ter (fĭl'tər) n.
v. tr.
[Middle English filtre, from Old French, from Medieval Latin filtrum, of Germanic origin; see pel-5 in Indo-European roots.] fil'ter·er n., fil'ter·less adj. |
Filter
A set of criteria used to help an investor narrow down which financial instruments or conditions of financial instruments are the most profitable.
Investopedia Commentary
Most beginner investors feel overwhelmed by the large number of financial products available in each type of market. Filters help narrow down the investor's or trader's search, so the decision of which securities to trade is less complicated. Filters are not limited to finding companies by stock screeners technical analysis tools can also help an investor or trader find a particular financial instrument. For example, if a trader wants to find financial instruments that are trading above their 200-day moving average, he or she can use a filter to find such instruments.
Related Links
Getting To Know Stock Screeners
Introduction to Types of Trading: Technical Traders
Introduction to Types of Trading: Fundamental Traders
See also: Moving Average, Simple Moving Average, Stock Screener, Technical Analysis
filter fil·ter (fĭl'tər)
n.
A porous material through which a liquid or gas is passed in order to separate the fluid from suspended particulate matter.
A device containing such a substance.
Any of various electric, electronic, acoustic, or optical devices used to reject signals, vibrations, or radiations of certain frequencies while passing others.
A translucent screen, used in both diagnostic and therapeutic radiology, that permits the passage of rays having desirable levels of energy.
A device used in spectrophotometric analysis to isolate a segment of the spectrum.
To pass a liquid or gas through a filter.
To remove by passing through a filter.
To pass through or as if through a filter.
filter
1. (Originally Unix, now also MS-DOS) A program that processes an input data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as a stage in a pipeline (see plumbing). Compare sponge.
2. (functional programming) A higher-order function which takes a predicate and a list and returns those elements of the list for which the predicate is true. In Haskell:
filter p [] = [] filter p (x:xs) = if p x then x : rest else rest where rest = filter p xs
See also filter promotion.
[The Jargon File]
