Subject: Re: OT: big companies
There are ~800 stocks in the Russell 1000 & 2000 that have a VL timeliness rating. You cannot realistically do that sort of digging into all the potential candidate stocks.
I think you have to decide upon a decent data source and go with it.

Actually it's not a big deal at all to do sanity checks.
Say you want 40 stocks from this screen, or another.
Find the top 50 picks from the database you have.
Start at the top and do a quick sanity check on them starting from the top. Maybe a few minutes apiece.
(for example, for ROE, just pull up the VL report page and look at the row for equity, and the row for earnings--if both are trending reasonably well, there isn't a big recent anomaly)
If there are some stock picks that look fishy, skip them, and take the top 40 of those that are OK.

You won't catch some that were erroneously far down the list that should have been high, but that's not where the danger lies.
Skipping one good pick isn't a problem; buying a bad one is.

A lot of data fields aren't subject to anomalies as much as ROE is. All kinds of things can throw it off: assets booked at far from true value like real estate or dud goodwill. Or simply an unusually good or bad year for earnings.
Maddeningly, ROE is probably the best single data field one could use as a predictor of long run returns from a stock.
And oddly still works better than anything else even with all those problems.

For example, when I do a quant screen which has a momentum sort, I always check to see if the stock has just had a buyout offer.
Those will show good momentum looking backwards because of the bid premium, but will generally be flat going forwards.
You don't usually even have to read the news...it's one of the few things that really jumps out at you from a price chart.

All that being said, trying the paper portfolio is a great idea.
Performance in any short period might be good or might be bad--there is always variation.
But it is always very useful to do the picks, and look them up to get a feel for what sort of thing it tends to pick.
What industries, balance sheets, market caps, dividend styles.
I was looking at a screen yesterday, and it has an inordinate fondness for tobacco firms, not my favourite sector.

Jim