About a month ago, I opened a "crapshoot" portfolio, putting $200 (whoopie) into each of 46 different small or microcap stocks that I thought might rebound faster than the market as a whole. To find itty-bitty potential winners, I ran a screen on Etrade for companies with: (1) price under $2, (2) no or very minimal debt (less than 5% of total capital), (3) a positive cash flow in 2008 and a projected positive cash flow for 2009, (4) a Price/Sales ratio no greater than 5:1, (5) at least some projected revenue growth for 2009, (6) a market cap between $10MM and $200MM, and (7) an average volume of at least 10K shares per day. In sum, I looked for small, growing, profitable, and actively traded companies with plenty of cash to weather the current economic downturn.

My initial screen turned up only 11 companies. The complete list: ACHI, EGHT, CAGC, COOL, CPHI, EGMI, MAG, OPTV, SDBT, and SLP. I bought them all, then started "cheating" on my stringent criteria to find 37 more (adding companies that met all the criteria except projected growth, for example, as there are lots of small companies with no analyst coverage and hence no projections at all about next year's sales.)

Anyway, my $10K "crapshoot" portfolio is now worth $11,350 after two weeks, and not surprisingly, the initial "best" 11 have outperformed the portfolio as a whole. GO AHCI!