Everybody wants to trade penny stocks. The reason for that is that they have the reputation of having big percentage gains (or losses) in any given day. You can make (or lose) a load boat load of money real quick.
.
A list of penny stocks can be found almost anywhere on the internet. Why not, these companies need to raise capital so they can expand their business or even to buy the needed equipment so their company can grow one day be one of the big dogs. There are so many penny stocks out there that are traded everyday, but where are they list? On which board do they trade?
.
Most of these stocks are traded on the secondary boards, OTCBB (over the counter bulletin board), Pink Sheets and a few others.
.
The main reason that they are so popular is because they are cheap enough where the average person can afford them. How cheap? Well, a stock is considered a penny stock when it’s price per share is less than $5. Many of them are actually less than $1 (they really are penny stocks).
.
Just because they are that cheap doesn’t mean that you’ll make a ton of money. Some of these stocks will sit at those levels for months and in a few cases, years. Many amateur traders or newcomers feel that these stocks are on their way up and also feel they can’t get any cheaper. That can’t be further from the truth. If you look around on some of these lists of penny stocks, you will see some even trade in what is referred to as sub-penny. Stay away from these types of stocks. Only one out of thousand will ever get out of this range.

If you want a list of penny stocks, go to Yahoo Finance and type in pink sheet or OTCBB, you will get a list of stocks that you can pick through. Be careful and do your due diligence on the company before investing.
.
.
P.S. Want to learn more about the stock market? take a free two week trail with Jim Cramer from TheStreet.com

Now a days it’s really hard to find any decent safe investments. The old buy and hold routine doesn’t work in these trouble times, and as for trying to day trade, you’re taking your hard earned money in your own hands.
.
A safe Investment right now seems to be in CD’s, bonds and Treasury bonds, but the problem there is that the return is quite low. After having your portfolio, need it be a discretionary one or your 401K/IRA, beaten up as bad as it has in the last year. Some may not want to deal with a 3% return on their money and have it tied up for nine months or longer to get it.
.
High yield safe investments like junk bonds aren’t any better. They involve alot of risk and again after what we’ve gone through, do you really need more risk?
.
The only safe investment advice that I would be comfortable giving you is to do your research into strong companies (of course you won’t know they’re strong until after the research) that have been beaten up because of the market as a whole brought the price down.
.
One company that has taken a beaten because of the hedge fund redemption is Quanta Services Inc. (NYSE:PWR). The company has a great balance sheet and has orders out until 2010. They are expecting great numbers in this quarter. Thursday the stock hit a new 52-week low at $12.27. A level that hasn’t been seen since February of 2006.
.
I don’t consider too many stocks to be a safe investment the way the markets have been moving. Monday morning the DOW opened at 9,141.01 and the intra-day low on Thursday was 7,979.60, but then closed Thursday at 8,835.25.
.
The safest investment right now might be not investing.

photo by azrainamn
.
In these trouble times of the stock market no one is really sure what stock is going to break out and post some beautiful gains. Of course there are many out there that will offer you their services. I’m here to tell you, beware of wolves on sheep’s clothing.
.
When you go ahead and type “stock market” or anything similar to that in Google search, you will get several million returned pages. The results are astounding as to the different types of sites you will find. many of them are site designed to get you to buy into their program or at least to leave your e-mail.
.
The one and only purpose to these site are to make money off of you not to help you make money in the stock market. In some cases you will find that they offer you “tips” after you subscribe to their service. Sometimes it’s a monthly service, but mainly it’s by the year. The reason why many of them don’t do it by the month is because after the first or second month you would cancel once you see that you’re not making gains in your portfolio.
.
The other way these sites will make money off of you is a little more shady that the other. These are the sites that will go ahead and say that they will send you daily notices for no charge. You only have to give them your e-mail. The way that they make money is that they will send you “tips” on stocks that they are already in or that they’ve just recently pumped up. Showing you graphs and charts showing that the stock is at the break out point. What they don’t tell you is that they are the ones pumping it.
.
If enough people jump into the stock it will cause the price to rise, at which point they start dumping their position leaving you and others hold the bag.
.
There is one stock right now that I’ve been watching because of one of these services. I learned about it through Twitter. I will not disclose the person or the stock for obvious reasons, but I will tell the rest. The person posts on Twitter the the particular stock has moved X amount on X amount of volume. This stock jumped 66% that day, the next day it jumped 125%. In the last week it dropped 95%. With these moves the stock now sit 56% below from where the person started hyping it.
.
Just in case you were wondering what type of stock has movements that big in percentage. Penny stocks move like that all the time. That is why you shouldn’t invest more than 10% of your portfolio to penny stocks. You can lose all that you invest in these kinds of plays.
.
To make matters worse, the Bid price never rose above the starting price until two days ago where it went to the height of the hype just long enough for one entity to dump several thousand shares. That is also why the stock is now down more than it was in the beginning.
.
In the mist of all these types of people out there, there are those that are legitimate and very helpful. The only one that I would at this time recommend is Jim Cramer from TheStreet.com

Because of who he is and the influence that he has, he is not allowed to invest in the stock market himself. Instead he has a portfolio that the money goes to charity. We have an affiliate program with him that offers you a free
two week trial. I suggest that you give it a try. What the heck, it’s free.