There was a time, once upon a time in la la land, I used to have a contrarian trading opinion.
In a way you need to be contrarian, other ways it pays not to be and to trade with the crowd.
My contrarian trading opinion then was to look for undiscovered stocks.
Looking for small caps but just by viewing the charts, not from studying more about the company. The contrarian part was looking at small turnover stocks, stuff that was off the beaten track.
There's often a plethora of media news releases on companies and often I would buy something which appealed regarding news.
Also often I would get lured by breakouts only to suffer loss as the share price tanked.
Overall the results were hit and miss.
You probably already know that as the capitalization of stocks increases, in aggregate turnover also increases. Turnover being dollars traded.
You probably already know that fund managers etc usually avoid small cap stocks.
You probably know that retail traders do not trade size like professionals do.
Adding one plus one, we can deduce that small cap stocks will trade small size in terms short term turnover and longer term turnover due to cap and predominant retail involvement.
What happens if a penny stock has huge turnover relative to past events and relative to all other small caps?
We can assume three things, stock manipulation by lone wolf, pump and dump by media, or institutional involvement because they are drawn in by merit of some particular sort or other.
Now comes the part to decipher which is which because if it’s institutional we may want to take the stock more seriously as a trading contender.
If it's a lone wolf manipulator, chances are it’s a dummy move and will head opposite.
If it's P&D then sometime in the future expect all hell to break loose.
If you’re a day trader, fine chase everything but you need to sit at your computer with a beady eye on things and be prepared to move fast.
So with penny stocks the first place to look is very high turnover relative to everything else, then filter out the duds.
For me entry level is $3mil per day minimum. US stocks would be higher I assume. More later.....