Nobody knows the future of anything. But there are quite clear signs on high potential stocks very early in the game, that is what this thread will describe later. Give me time to get there.
If you have the patience of Job, you could wait for stocks to drop down to bargain levels. And these are not even penny stocks. BAC went down to $5 I believe and some nurses who were friends of my doctor friend bought 3 months salaries in shares of BAC. CZR I saw it when it was $14-$15 and had positions, got stopped out. My mistake was not re-entering. It went as high as $119. Disclaimer: You may have to wait years to get your chance. Just a waste of time though. In that period, you can place multiple trades and make a lot more monies just by trading. Lots of trading opportunities out there. You have to get in and take your shot though. If not, too bad for you. You missed out.
Careful. If you short stocks (borrowing shares from the broker), especially penny stocks, your risk to the upside is unlimited. It takes just one bad trade to wipe you out. Remember, any stock you borrow shares against to short, you have to buy back those shares and return those shares to the broker, a lot of times at unfavorable stock prices.
There are clues about the possible future in every company. Long term success often involves ignoring short term weakness especially in juniors because markets are often inefficient. Some of my worst holdings in recent months are non-energy small cap stocks. Nothing fundamentally has changed for them other then ALL small caps being hammered. I saw signs late last week that some of them are going up. For the penny stocks ( well under $1 ), the gains can be massive if serious buyers come in. Volume spikes are a huge indicator because often volume goes to almost nothing in down trends and you just can't get out of a stock without taking the daily bottom. I would think overall sentiment for small caps really important I did really well on juniors from November 2020 to maybe February/March 2021 but they haven't been a good area since except energy.
Some penny stocks have good fundamentals or are decent gambles in a sector that has some growth potential. However, they require a lot of patience and you often have to sit on a loss. What I do is if they spike up twice then fail I'm done with them unless they post something like game changing earnings. If some genuine bad news arrives I may bail anyways.
I can't accurately comment as I don't trade crypto. What can differentiate Pennies from Crypto will be Cap size and liquidity. The larger the Cap proportionally you will get higher turnover, bigger players, more difficult to manipulate. So if you have small cap with illiquid turnover then yes, it will apply I assume. But pump and dump methods applies to small crypto, the smaller ones, definitely, there's been a lot of news recently on this.