As with other high-risk investment vehicle, penny stocks offer high leverage for the investors. A small amount of increase of the price of the stock can make a good amount of money for the investor. It is also very important for the investor to be willing to sit on the stock for a long period and view this investment as a long term gain.

Penny stocks are any stock that trades below $1 per share or sometimes below $5 per share. The shares generally fluctuate in value. Therefore, it is important the understand the movement of its price not only by using technical analysis but also by using fundamental understanding of the company’s assets, growth, and direction.

I would recommend that someone interested in investing in penny stocks would ask assistance from investment advisers. A good way to do it is to subscribe to investment newsletters offering investment advice. Be cautious though in choosing the newsletter that you would subscribe to. If you are on the lookout of a good investment newsletter here are some tips for you:

1. The company offers 24/7 customer service
2. The customer service representatives are friendly, courteous, and professional
3. The editors answers your inquiry either by mail, email, or fax (most editors won’t answer your questions via phone because they are constantly looking for good stocks to recommend)
4. they have good winners to losers ratio in their portfolio (6 winners out of 8 open positions is really hot)
5. And the company provides you access to the company’s model portfolio when you ask for it.

There are so many investment newsletters out there, but if you want excellence, you may want to consider the tips above.

In order to fund these activities, they sell shares in their companies for attractively low prices in the hopes that they indeed find marketable quantities of the resource in question. In the event that they do indeed find what they are looking for, the value of the company increases by many factors resulting in amazing returns for investors. These stocks are incredible volatile for three main reasons: the first is that they are already trading in ‘pennies’ so a one penny increment can represent an enormous percentage difference in price.

Secondly, as investors await word from geophysical tests and explorations, the price is incredibly vulnerable to rumours of all kinds that one or another investor may feel is or is not applicable to the success or failure of that particular company.

The third reason that these stocks are so volatile is that they are often traded at incredibly small volumes leading them to be incredibly susceptible to buy or sell requests from speculators.

Unfortunately, these stocks are also vehicles for dishonesty and insider trading. In the case of BRE-X, for example, the stocks price increased by many multiples on news that resources were found that would result in unprecedented profits. Such news gave an incredible injection of positive will towards the company and many people invested their entire life’s savings, only to find that these results were fraudulent and that the company did not in fact have any basis for their reports, but making millions of dollars for those responsible in the meantime as they allowed their stocks to increase in value, and selling before the collapse was exposed. Caution should always be practiced when buying and selling penny stocks.

There’s a common perception that they are very risky, and there is some truth to this. The risk is not caused by the low price of the penny stocks. Many foreign exchanges typically price even their blue-chips in share prices which are less than a dollar. And because penny shares are not marginable in North American brokerage accounts – which means your broker won’t lend money against their value – they are actually less risky than stocks that trade for higher prices, as the most you can lose with pennies is your initial investment.

But there are some ways in which penny stocks are riskier than stocks that trade for higher prices if you’re not good at understanding the stock market. They tend to be smaller companies, and thus their management is not typically comparable in quality to that larger companies where the remuneration paid to executives can be much higher. Their smaller capitalizations make them more subject to insider manipulation. And they tend to be involved in riskier enterprises such as mining exploration.

In addition to the added risk, there are some other difficulties in trading penny stocks which you should consider. Institutional investors – such as mutual funds and pension funds – avoid them because they are too illiquid to buy in large quantities. This creates a problem for the retail investor as well. If you accumulate a large position in a penny stock you may find it very difficult to reduce your position. There simply may not be enough buyers who wish to buy your stock on any given day. In fact, some penny stocks are so illiquid that they do not trade every day. This illiquidity leads to another problem in trading them: the large bid-ask spreads. The bid-ask spread is the difference between the bid price and the asking price of a share.

In penny stocks it can sometimes be very large, with the difference representing a large percentage of the share’s value. With penny stocks it’s important not to put in market orders unless you’re confident that the spread is small, and that there is sufficient volume trading to fill your order. Otherwise, make it a practice only to use limit orders, and be patient. Volatility is another problem with penny stocks. For this reason you should generally avoid using stop-losses, particularly with very thinly traded issues, as you can easily be stopped out of a position simply by routine trading swings.

Penny stocks are risky, but they can also be rewarding. Returns of 100 percent, 500 percent, or even 1000 percent or more do happen. And since you can only lose a maximum of 100 percent on any single trade, you don’t need to pick a winner every time in order to make a significant return on your investment. Just be sure to limit the portion of your portfolio invested in penny stocks, and then pick a basket of them, rather than putting all of your money into a single name or two. Trading penny stocks can increase your investment returns, provided you trade them with caution, and are fully aware

However, if any of these companies hit it big, their shares go up a ton and that makes the original investors big dollars. The term return of investment is a word tossed around used to show how much you get on your investment. The best performing stocks in the past decade have been penny stocks. Penny stocks start low and when they get to be a few dollars per share, that is huge profits since the percentages are so high (some into the thousands time the starting price).

Cheap stocks provide for large potentials but large losses since there is a ton of risk. Anyone can invest in a safe company like a Microsoft or Google by buy stocks online, but those are expensive and barely go up, but are steady. Penny stocks are one of the easiest ways to lose money. Everybody is looking for the best penny stock investment hoping to make money. You run into a ton of pump and dump techniques, where someone boasts about a stock, waits for an increase in price, and then sells all of theirs. Penny stocks are actually not that liquid and are very tough to gauge.

The prices of the stocks are almost actually never affected by what the company does, but what the market does. There are some penny stocks that can do well, but extreme research is needed. One must look at the financials of a given company to really see if the company has profit potential. One of the biggest things to look for is liquidity and assets, meaning having lots of cash, with almost no debts. Finding this is just about as rare as finding a penny stock that hits it big. Anyone can invest in penny stocks, but the risk is so great, it really is not even worth it. You may even have a better shot winning the lotto.