Passive investors pooh-pooh the idea of stock screening, or searching the vast universe of stocks for ones with promising attributes like modest valuations and fat dividend yields. They believe stock pickers can t consistently beat the market, so there s little point in hunting for winners. Better to own shares of an index fund that seeks to mimic the market as a whole.

And yet, passive investors are screening whether they know it or not. No index tracks all stocks. All make choices. For example, the S&P 500, by far the most widely tracked stock index, selects the 500 American companies that cost the most in terms of the sum value of their outstanding shares.

Index funds make excellent sense for most investors. Their fees are typically low, their taxes are minimal and they re blessedly easy. As the man selling rotisserie ovens on television says, "Just set it and forget it." The question is, since the index fund buyer is running an automated stock screen anyhow, might they be better off screening for something other than expensiveness?

That s just what so-called fundamental indexes seek to offer. They range from simple to complex. On the simple side, WisdomTree (WSDT) offers exchange-traded funds that redefine company size as the amount of earnings produced or dividends paid, not the market price investors are paying at the moment. Its Earnings 500 fund (EPS) therefore has a lower price/earnings ratio than the S&P 500 index, while its Large Cap Dividend fund (DLN) has a bigger dividend yield (3.7% compared with the S&P 500 s 2.6%, after taking into account recent dividend cuts).

More complicated is the Dynamic Market Portfolio (PWC), sort of a full stock-screen-in-a-can offered by Invesco s Powershares. It periodically scans the 2,000 largest companies for the 100 most attractive based on 25 attributes. Powershares won t say what these are exactly, but only that they have to do with company fundamentals, stock valuation, timeliness and risk.

Perhaps in between these approaches are the RAFI (Research Associates Fundamental Index) ETFs, also run by Powershares (Schwab offers the mutual fund versions). The RAFI approach, developed by Robert Arnott, former editor of the prestigious Financial Analysts Journal, weights companies by four measures of economic importance: cash flow, sales, book value and dividends.

So how are the one-step stock screens doing? Mostly, they haven't impressed of late. Perhaps that's because while stocks with skimpy valuations usually outperform in a down market, they ve sharply underperformed during the extreme downturn of the past year. Those modest prices usually signal company flaws, and in a bad enough economy, some otherwise manageable flaws can sink companies.

I ve only highlighted U.S. funds, but there are international choices, too. WisdomTree says 13 of its 14 international funds have beaten their benchmarks since inception. It s a young company, though, so that s only a couple of years -- we ll see.

All told, recent returns might not be representative of future ones, as the fine print usually says, only this time it s meant hopefully. Cheap stocks have taken such a beating over the past year that value itself might be something of a value now, and fundamental indexes might be due to outperform.