Have you seen stock advertisements like this online that make fantastic claims?
I see them all too frequently and while I don't know whether they are scams, I do know that penny stocks are very dangerous. For the ad above, I clicked through to the site and immediately went down to the bottom of the page looking for a disclaimer or terms & conditions section.
I found a Disclaimer link and was taken to a page of solid legal writing but I didn't have to go far to find something very interesting and very scary. The VERY FIRST sentence on the disclaimer page was this: 
Clearly this is NOT something you want to read before you pull out your wallet to pay for some penny stock picking system or sign up to their newsletter. You can lose YOUR ENTIRE INVESTMENT!
That, in a nutshell is why penny stock are so risky. They shouldn't ever be bought by beginners and yet so often they attract a beginner's attention because they are cheap. Ads like these are good at getting the attention of novice investors and those are the very people that should stay as far away from penny stocks as possible.
My advice would be to resist the temptation of clicking on an ad like this and to NOT sign up for any newsletter. You will just get in trouble and probably lose money if you get involved later on. Instead, go out and buy a copy of The Stock Market For Dummies and learn the basics of stock investing so you can put your money in stocks that have a chance of going up and making you money!
BEWARE OF 2550% PENNY STOCK GAINS ADS
STOCK MARKET: LOW VOLUME = HIGH VOLATILITY
Is it a good time to buy stocks when the market shows low volume like we will see this week during Thanksgiving? A lot of people are busy with family events and others are out shopping which means little time will be devoted to thinking about stocks and planning their investments.
It is during low volume weeks like these that we often see a lot higher volatility. When fewer people are buying and selling during these slow days, the stock trades that do occur move the market up and down a lot more than they do during normal volume trading days. Low volume = increased volatility.
Day traders love the market to be volatile because they make their money quickly when the market moves one way or another. When the market is moving sideways, it is harder for them to pick a direction.
On Monday we have already seen the stock market go down over 300 points before making a little bit of a comeback towards the end of the day. More worries from Europe and an impasse from the 12 member Congress Super Committee debating the U.S. debt ceiling was responsible today for the down day. But because of the low trading volume, it was probably a worse day for the Dow than it would have been had it not been a big holiday week.
Buying stocks when volume is low means you have to be prepared to see the market go up or down more than it might during other weeks. If you are an investor buying stocks for the long haul, it probably won't matter if you pay a bit more or a bit less (depending on whether your stock goes up or down) for your stocks. Just be warned that the prices of the stock(s) you are interested in might be moving more than usual just because of the low volume.
