My only penny stock is SpaceDev Inc. (OTCBB: SPDV) and I am not recommending you buy any. I do not recommend any penny stocks and will leave that to others.

If you did buy some, it would probably move the stock because the trading volume is so low that you can actually have an impact. I'm losing a few hundred dollars over the course of about two years.

I bought the company after I had witnessed both launches of Space Ship One into sub-orbital space and wanted to keep track of this interesting company that created the motor and fuel technology.

This week, the company announced that its devices successfully landed on Mars. SpaceDev "provided a wide array of hardware and instruments for the Phoenix Lander that successfully landed on Mars' north arctic plane Sunday, May 25th at 4:53 pm PDT."

SPDV closed Wednesday at $0.62, unchanged. Its 52 week range is $0.51 to $1.05. There are no significant metrics worthy of discussion, but as a shareholder I am supporting an important aerospace company that is designing and building cutting edge space-age technology and keeping me informed and educated. It is located in Southern California, allowing me the opportunity to visit the company easily.

There is little chance of a big financial reward, unless one of its technologies finds some broad popular use, but sometimes there are other things in life that mean more.

Sheldon Liber is the CEO of a small private investment company and the principal for design and research at an architecture & planning firm. He writes the columns Chasing Value and Serious Money. Disclosure: I own shares of SPDV.

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.

In the past, I've written about mPhase Technologies (OTC: XDSL), an obscure penny stock that has been touting its technology on YouTube, and has hired Jonathan Lebed, who settled stock manipulation charges with the SEC as a teenager, to pump its stocks.

Oh, and the CEO, Ronald Durando, recently signed a consent decree with the SEC and agreed to forfeit $150 thousand in gains derived from an alleged pump-and-dump involving a now defunct company called PacketPort.

Given that series of red flags, why have investors given mPhase, a company with a long history of big losses, a market valuation of nearly $25 million? At least part of it probably stems from the companies much-hyped research it is conducting at Bell Labs.

One of Thomas Jefferson's "Ten Rules" is: "Never buy what you don't want because it is cheap." I've had plenty of $8 shirts and $3 CDs that serve as haunting reminders of this axiom. (Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch? Oh, who am I kidding ... I did want that).

But there's a time and a place for a good bargain. Finding out your local museum offers free visits. Going out to eat on weeknights to score bargain prix-fixe dinners. Taking advantage of the day-after-Thanksgiving sales, torturous though they are.

The same wisdom applies to stock trading. An investor shouldn't scoop up 100 shares of company XYZ just because its price looks like a steal (it could, after all, be cheap for a reason). But there are single-digit stocks that happen to be beckoning for a breakout or ripe for a recovery. Move in at the right time, and you could wind up with a hidden gem for a bargain price ... just like my Marky Mark CD.

In the next few days, I'll be looking at 10 stocks below the $10 threshold that look like decent plays right now. Some will be short-term opportunities; others will be better suited for those who prefer to buy and hold. Naturally, these stocks probably won't all be winners -- consider some on par with those unworn clearance-rack shirts I've long since taken to Goodwill. But for those who say sub-$10 stocks aren't worth the certificates they are printed on, you may just learn something.

Beth Gaston Moon is an analyst at Schaeffer's Investment Research.

The New York Post's Roddy Boyd reports on Hear at Last, a tiny penny stock company that's taking out ads on CNBC -- and promoting its stock in those ads.

See for yourself: Someone was kind enough to upload the commercial onto YouTube.

According to Boyd, "Pink-sheet companies ConnectAJet and Hear At Last have seen their stock prices jump after their commercials ran, despite having threadbare operating histories....An ad purchase on CNBC can cost a pink-sheet company as little as $20,000 but offers an audience of thousands of well-heeled investors and traders."

Carmen Electra gained fame as a Playboy centerfold and scantily-clad star of Baywatch, but her latest business ventures may not be so innocent. Take a look at a few examples of her involvement with shady penny stock promotions:

• Back in June of 2006, MarketWatch's Chuck Jaffe wrote up a company Electra was involved with as his Stupid Investment of the Week. Jaffe received a phone call featuring the prerecorded voice of Carmen Electra, touting a company called Luvoo.com (OTC PK: LUVT). Shares of that company have since collapsed to 8 cents per share.

• Electra also signed on as a spokesman for a company called eFoodSafety.com (OTC BB: EFSF), and the company put out a press release hyping her involvement.

• The most interesting one: Payment Data Systems Inc. (OTC BB: PYDS) is a tiny microcap that announced its Carmen Electara prepaid Mastercard last year. Here's where it gets potentially shady. The company paid penny stock shill Jonathan Lebed $25,000 for a one-month investor relations contract that mainly consisted of sending out emails to his subscribers touting the stock with messages like "Combined with PYDS's new Carmen Electra debit cards and many more celebrities coming soon, it doesn't get much bigger than this!!!"

• For those of you who don't remember, Lebed made headlines in 2000 when he settled SEC charges of stock manipulation -- at the age of 15. Ever the self-promoter, Mr. Lebed posted a YouTube video of himself rubbing elbows with Ms. Electra.
  

I don't know the extent of Ms. Electra's involvement with these companies/stock promotions. But the fact is she has gotten herself involved with some pretty shady characters, and it's something her handlers may want to keep an eye on: Associating with the targets of SEC investigations can be a career-killer.

It used to be that you could avoid ads for fraudulent stock promotions if you didn't open up spam emails and managed to stay off the lists of boiler room cold-callers and mail houses. But now these thugs are taking out ads in top newspapers, according to The New York Times (permalink).

Such venerable publications as The New York Times and USA Today (by venerable I meant The Times) are featuring full-page ads touting "emerging growth" companies. If you want to know what that is, take a look at the insightfully sardonic Penny Stock Player's Dictionary:

Emerging Growth Company -- an implausible story about a hypothetical business.

Emerging Growth Stock -- a scam.

I hate penny stock spam as much as the next guy, and Kevin Kelly wrote an interesting piece on the SEC's efforts to crack down on it. But whenever I hear about this stuff, I have to wonder: How stupid do you have to be to buy a stock because you receive an email from someone you don't know saying that a stock you've never heard of is going to da moon?

A recent Associated Press article referred to the SEC filing charges "against two Houston-area men, accusing them of hijacking personal computers to send out spam e-mails and bilk investors out of $4.6 million." (emphasis added)

First of all, someone who buys stock based on a spam email isn't an investor. In fact, I can't even type the word I would use to describe someone who does that because BloggingStocks is supposed to be PG. And I would argue that these "investors" really bilked themselves out of $4.6 million through their unbridled greed and gullibility.

I don't think that the people who lose money on these penny stock scams can be characterized as victims. Their downfall is exactly the same as that of the perpetrators of these crimes: Greed.

When it comes to getting started in stock investing, many of us (myself included) look at the volume of information that's available and instantly become nearly overwhelmed with the sheer magnitude of it all. There's so much to learn about the markets. There are so many directions one could go. How does a person who just received a $2000 windfall take that money and invest it for himself or herself? How to find a broker? How to create and diversify a reasonably safe portfolio? There are a million questions that can be asked. Where are the answers and how much information is actually necessary to learn to make a safe start? I don't have that $2000 windfall to invest but I have that desire so I had a look around and I found out about investment clubs.

Investment clubs are kind of like mini mutual funds. They can be a very small coalition of amateur investors who have pooled resources to buy stocks and create a portfolio, or they can actually be groups that become large enough to form their own limited liability corporations. The magic lies in the fact that they don't have to bear the management fees associated with true mutual funds and the members most often vote on the choices of stocks their money will be invested in. This significantly reduces operating costs and helps small investors realize better returns from their invested funds.

Members of investment clubs have some serious advantages over the small investors who try to do it alone. They get input and support from the other club members. They get the benefit of a wide range of investment viewpoints. They get purchasing discounts through the increased volume of each stock purchase they're involved in and they get the comfort of knowing that there are other investors who are willing to take the same risks they are. It's a team concept and some people have gotten very wealthy utilizing it.

Over the counter (OTC) stocks interest me but the pink sheets appear to be too risky. What is it I find most intriguing about OTC stocks? They allow a person with more nerve than money to break into the stock market game. Pink sheets and penny stocks are historically the most risk prone investment vehicles. They're kind of like a trip to the casino. Going in there requires the investor to be prepared for the real possibility of leaving some money behind. OTC stocks on the other hand, provide a noticeably bit more security and some are actually stocks from very solid companies that are just unable to meet the price and volume requirements of the large stock exchanges.

The OTC Bulletin Board is the place to find out what OTC stocks are available. There are surprises on the OTC with some business names we all recognize. Others, I've never heard of. There's one thing for sure, it's a lively place where there is money to be made. If someone is entering the sport of stock trading, the OTC BB can be an excellent place to get started in my opinion.

OTC stocks require some special investment knowledge. Knowledge not in the sense of special analytical skills, but in the sense of having the desire to pick some winners and the patience to do some foot work. Making prudent investments in OTC companies, requires learning about them. There must be willingness to do some research about potential prospects. The more research done, the higher quality the knowledge will be. The trick to the sport is to find the companies that are ready to go upward. If the timing is right, then the possibility of actually making some dollars exists.

I'll be writing more about getting started with stock trading. Taking things easy may be my best bet. It's been an awfully long fourth quarter this year but let's just hang in there.