In the past, stock suggestions would come from a stock broker who almost certainly would not have full knowledge of all the stocks available on the market. With the advent of the Internet, sites dedicated to investing and the stock market have become commonplace.

One feature, called a stock screener, allows an investor to filter a database of stocks by whatever criteria they wish to find a number of stocks that might be worth investing in.

The most valuable feature is the trading volume selector which allows you to filter stocks by how many shares are traded on a daily basis. This is important in the penny stock sector as some fundamentally strong companies trade so few shares daily that they present strong liquidity concerns. As well, being able to sort by industry give you the ability to focus on a specific sector in which you are interested.

The drawbacks to this stock screener two fold. The search terms are limited. You can only choose stocks from $0-$1 or $0-$5, you can only filter by P/E ratio, stock performance and earnings growth. As well, you cannot choose which exchange you wish to specify. This screener will choose stocks on the NYSE, AMEX, NASDAQ, and OTC markets.

Generally you will likely have to do multiple searches with different parameters to find the stocks you want.

Using this screener you can filter by price (i.e shares trading $0.16 to $1.93), Price/Earnings, debt/equity, earnings per share, growth rate, index, sector and multiple other factors that allow you to filter stocks by virtually variables you would ever wish to define.

The two problems are as follows:

With this screener is that it will only produce a maximum of 100 results. While this is not a serious drawback, it might prove to be troublesome if, for example, you simply needed a list of companies within a particular sector or industry.

As well, OTC stocks are not included in the exchange options. Thus, no stocks in that market will come up in search results.

Stock Growth rate has more variables, as does profit margin as well as the ability to filter by a volatility measurement (beta vs SPX).

There is one large problem with this stock screener. There is no way to filter by stock price. The only possible way to choose via stock price would be through a market cap search. This represents a serious problem to the penny stock investor and the largest single reason this stock screener would be avoided.

The other issue, is that the OTC market is excluded from all searches.

All exchanges are available (including the Canadian exchanges) which gives the user the largest pool of stocks to filter.

The options are extensive, including the crucial stock price and trading volume fields essential to the penny stock investor. Of interest, may be the additional options that allow you to compare a P/E, P/B or profit margin to other firms of a similar industry.

The research available (always more extensive for non-OTC stocks) is valuable, but again, users would likely be best served doing their research elsewhere.

This stock screener should be your first choice in your efforts to find stocks worthy of investing.

Searches.

Stocks $0.01 to $5.00

Yahoo - 2500 stocks (maximum results allowed)

Wall Street Research Net - 100 (maximum results allowed)

Hoovers (not possible to search by stock price)

Financial Web - 13, 605