Penny stocks are the sole focus for many day traders for obvious reasons. They behave with much more volatility largely in part due to their cheaper purchase prices and the fact that this makes them more vulnerable to outside trading influence. This is why it's common see a cheap stock quickly double or triple in value in the short term. Obviously the real challenge with these fast-moving investments is differentiating between the good and bad and detecting upswings before they happen.

To do this, millions of traders have been embracing a relatively new technology modeled after the same with professional use day in and day out called a penny stock screener.

A penny stock screener is a piece of technology which uses the full spectrum of the market to find overlaps and behavior from the past to the present to determine exactly how current stocks are set to perform in the short-term. It's both reliable and a major timesaver in the sense that you don't have to perform any analytics by using a penny stock screener and instead you can simply invest based on the picks which the program generates for you.

The most important thing to understand about a penny stock screener is how it actually works to determine which cheap stocks are going to perform well. Stock behavior is cyclical and repeats itself just like the greater market itself. Say, for example, you have a well performing stock of the past and current stock exhibiting similar behaviors.

Just by looking at that stock of the past, you have and can put together a very precise depiction of what to expect from that current stock. Professional stock traders have been using this technology for several years now to aid them in their market analysis because while this is the most effective way to anticipate market behavior, at the same time it's difficult to take the full range of the market into account without the use of this technology.