No AI or tech company?

Screening Filters

1. Market Cap: $30M – $10B

   • Purpose: Focus on smaller to mid-sized companies that could grow several-fold, while avoiding the riskiest microcaps and the slowest mega-caps.
   • Rationale: For a stock under $5 to plausibly approach $50 in a couple of years, it usually needs room to grow in size. Very tiny companies (<$30M) can be extremely illiquid and speculative; very large ones (> $10B) are unlikely to 10x in such a short period. This range is a compromise: enough upside potential, but not purely penny-stock territory.

2. Price: $0.50 – $5.00

   • Purpose: Directly matches your request for “stocks currently under $5,” while filtering out ultra-low-priced “lottery ticket” names.
   • Rationale: Below about $0.50 you often get into distressed or highly manipulated stocks. Setting a $0.50 floor tries to keep the focus on companies with at least some market confidence, while still keeping the maximum at $5 in line with your original criteria.

3. Exchange: XNYS, XNAS, XASE (NYSE, Nasdaq, NYSE American)

   • Purpose: Restrict results to major U.S. exchanges.
   • Rationale: This improves reporting quality, governance standards, and liquidity. Stocks on these exchanges generally have stricter listing requirements than OTC or pink-sheet names, which is important when you’re searching for high-upside but legitimate businesses.

4. Sector: Industrials, Consumer Cyclicals, Consumer Non-Cyclicals, Financials, Healthcare, Industrial Goods, Mineral Resources, Energy, Energy – Fossil Fuels, Utilities, Real Estate

   • Purpose: Emphasize non–“pure tech” sectors while still allowing businesses that may use or benefit from tech and AI.
   • Rationale:
     • This sector list deliberately excludes the classic “Information Technology” / “Software & IT Services” buckets, which are often crowded and more speculative in the sub-$5 space.
     • However, many companies in Industrials, Healthcare, Financials, etc., can still be heavily technology-driven (e.g., healthcare companies using AI for diagnostics, industrials using automation and data analytics).
     • This helps find AI- or cloud-exposed companies outside traditional tech—sometimes where valuations are more reasonable and upside can be greater.

5. Themes: “AI Beneficiary”, “Cloud Computing”

   • Purpose: Explicitly target companies that either:

     • benefit from AI adoption, or
     • are involved in or supported by cloud-computing trends.

   • Rationale: This is the key filter addressing your follow-up:

     “no AI or tech companies in the selected stocks?”

     Even though the sector filter is not ‘Technology’, this theme filter specifically pulls in companies linked to AI and cloud. That can include:

     • Non-tech companies adopting AI at scale (e.g., logistics firms optimizing routes, financials using AI underwriting).
     • Companies providing cloud-based or AI-enabled services but classified under other sectors (e.g., healthcare IT often falls under Healthcare).

     In other words: you do get AI-/tech-related exposure, but the focus is on beneficiaries and users of AI/cloud, not just pure-play software startups.

6. Debt/Equity: max 2

   • Purpose: Avoid highly leveraged companies that might not survive long enough to realize high growth.
   • Rationale: For a potential high-multiplier story, balance sheet strength matters. A debt-to-equity ratio under 2 screens out the most indebted names, which are more vulnerable to interest-rate increases, downturns, or financing risk—especially important for smaller, growth-oriented companies.

7. Quarterly Revenue YoY Growth: minimum 5%

   • Purpose: Focus on companies that are actually growing their business, not just “cheap” on price.
   • Rationale: For a stock to realistically move from <$5 toward much higher levels, it usually needs fundamental growth (revenue and, eventually, earnings). Requiring at least 5% year-over-year revenue growth in the latest quarter:
     • Filters out flat or shrinking companies.
     • Keeps in names that are at least demonstrating some positive momentum, even if they’re earlier in their growth trajectory than the prior, stricter screen you saw.

Why Results Match Your Query (and the AI/Tech Angle)

• Your original goal: sub-$5 stocks with the potential for very large upside over a couple of years.
• The screener therefore:
  • Limits price to <$5.
  • Focuses on smaller companies (market cap $30M–$10B) with room to grow.
  • Requires at least modest revenue growth and reasonably clean balance sheets to avoid pure “story stocks.”

Regarding your specific question:

• “No AI or tech companies?”
  • The sector filter intentionally avoids classic “Tech” sectors to reduce exposure to the most speculative penny-tech names.
  • The theme filter does bring in AI and cloud-related companies—often in other sectors—so you still capture AI/cloud potential, just with (in theory) better diversification and slightly more fundamental grounding.

So the design is: AI and cloud-exposed companies, but not limited to—or dominated by—pure tech-sector penny stocks, all under $5 with at least some real growth and manageable leverage.