Am still paper trading at the moment to gain experience with Interactive Brokers, but will hopefully start real trades in a couple of weeks. Would love to try Stockstotrade, but I run on linux and the STT is not offered in that particular OS flavor.

Hi all, am throwing my hat into the ring to see if Sykes' approach to trading penny stocks is all it's cracked up to be. Part of my motivation is that, years ago when I was in graduate school, a friend of mine told me about penny stocks, and one in particular that was going through the roof (the first green day of a supernova, as I have subsequently learned). I was quite reluctant, but he convinced me and I finally invested $1000. I hung on for a couple of days and wouldn’t you know, the stock kept going up and up, vertiginously even. But after those initial gains, almost tripling my money, I got nervous thinking this ride can't last for ever, and sold to lock in a $3000 profit. Sure enough, the stock crashed the very next day. It was a lesson I'll never forget about how volatile penny stocks can be. I guess I had an innate sense about taking the ‘meat of the move’. However, even though I got out in time with a handsome gain, that kind of volatility frightened me. Yes, it was obviously possible to make a profit, but also very easy to lose. I knew many people (my father included) who lost at the stock market, so I treated this experience as a fluke, a one-off thing where I had been very lucky and never thought about pressing my luck again. Here we are, years later, and Sykes is convincing me that perhaps it wasn't such a fluke after all...