Profit from penny stocks touting themselves

Zac Bissonnette has written extensively about how penny stocks, or stocks trading below $5, promote themselves through big name lab connections, big name celebrity connections, ads on CNBC and how sometimes, just sometimes, they have to settle with the SEC. As somebody who's made and nearly lost a small fortune playing penny stocks, I've decided to get people to stop whining about the ugly side of this niche and learn to profit from it!

And, I mean profit from it legally -- that being to buy these stocks when they're being hyped and to short sell them when the hype wears off. The old Manhattan two-step. While I prefer to short sell, these stocks are already priced so low, the risk-reward ratio favors buying them. That's right; I'll gladly buy into companies I know to be questionable because my time horizon is short and I know no matter how often Zac and other people write about this subject, there are new suckers all the time. The great fool theory and all that. Time and again, these suckers naively throw their hard-earned cash into these long shots without bothering to learn about the risks involved. Since you're reading this, you've already proven that you're not just another sucker and that's good -- congratulations!

So, go on, follow these stocks and learn to play the hype game -- BloggingStocks willing, I'll be writing many more articles to help demystify this greatly misunderstood niche. I think you'll find that while penny stocks are more volatile than stocks like Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), they are surprisingly liquid and the games they play are surprisingly similar to the games played by respectable Wall Street companies.

Timothy Sykes writes for the blog timothysykes.com, is a former hedge fund manager, the star of Wall Street Warriors and author of the book, An American Hedge Fund: How I Made $2 Million as a Stock Operator & Created a Hedge Fund.