Effective screening is vital for traders in OTC and pink sheet stocks. Unlike other corners of the market, there are many thousands of OTC and pink sheet stocks, mostly worthless, with virtually no analyst or media coverage. The data can be so riddled with errors that many trading tool providers ignore these markets altogether. For example, while both Worden TC/2000 and FinViz offer customizable scanners that are quite robust for combing through Nasdaq and NYSE stocks, neither covers OTC or pink sheet stocks at all.
Many traders have reaped hefty rewards trading these small stocks, but doing so requires competent tools. Here are the best scanners currently available for OTC and pink sheet stocks:
1. Scanz
Scanz is easily the best OTC/pink sheet screening app available today. Scanz replaces the service once sold as EquityFeed, long a favorite among OTC traders. Few would argue that Scanz is visually more polished, but the underlying engine seems the same. Scanz offers over 100 pre-built scans, and is highly customizable with price, liquidity, technical, and fundamental filters:
Active OTC/pink sheet traders will also benefit from Scanz block trade alerts. Scanz does not come cheap: it costs $99/month + $15/month for OTC data.
2. TradingView
Most think of TradingView as a charting service, but it does include a strong Stock Screener tool with most of its paid service plans. OTC stocks are not enabled by default but can be added (or searched exclusively) by altering the exchange field. Note: TradingView at the moment only screens OTC QB stocks, not pink sheets.
Screens can filter by volume, float, market cap, price levels, technical indicators, country, # of employees and many other factors.
3. Barchart.com
Barchart.com‘s free scanner works fairly well on OTC stocks, but like TradingView does not cover pink sheets. Two filters particularly helpful to OTC traders are # of new highs in past 5 days (or 1 month) and Volume % change relative to 20-day average.
4. OTC Markets
The free stock screener on OTC Markets site only allows limited technical, volume and price filtering. However, unlike other screeners it lets you choose exactly which listing types (OTC QX, OTC QB, Pink current, Pink limited, Pink no information, grey market or expert market) and which instruments (common stocks, ADRs, foreign ordinaries, etc.) to include or exclude:
Excluding the Pink no infos, grey and expert market stocks, along with limiting screen to the highest level of price and volume action generates an interesting set of leads.
5. Broker screening tools
Almost all brokers offer screening tools; however, many do not cover OTCs or pink sheet stocks. For example, Schwab lets you screen OTC and pinks for preset conditions like volume rate of change spikes, or overbought RSI.
Combine these two and you have a decent first-pass filter. Interactive Brokers also provides its customers with strong screening tools that work on OTC and pink sheeet markets.
6. Stock-screener.org
Stock-screener.org offers a very basic but useful penny stock screening tool. The layout does not appear updated since the late 90s, but the screener works and takes little more than selecting minimum price and volume figures:
7. Finscreener
Finscreener has a preset “most actives” screen that generates a list of OTC stocks worth a quick perusal. Like stock-screener.org, there are few options for modification.
[…] best place to start looking for hot otc stocks is with Scanz’s breakouts module Simply limit the markets filter to OTC Markets and select your filter parameters – new 52-week […]