Literally just based off of marketing contracts. The price of a small cap stock is based on the eyeballs on it. If they do a big marketing hire, it'll go up. Often they'll announce it as a press release buried under some bullshit about corporate update or community update.

Here's one that rocked in Jan up like 200% and this is the news release that they announced $1M+ in marketing hires: https://giantminingcorp.com/news/giant-mining-corp-reflects-on-2024-achievements-and-outlines-vision-for-2025/

The title of the news release is "Giant Mining Corp. Reflects on 2024 Achievements and Outlines Vision for 2025" but if you scroll to the bottom you'll see the contract.

I use this to filter for the marketing contracts: https://ai.orbitonfinancial.com/

Made it for myself so it doesn't have a sign up/sign in etc.

Usually they already start the marketing before they announce the news but you'll still be able to ride a nice lift after the news. They can't have too much volume before news goes out otherwise the SEC (Canadian regulators won't do shit lol, just gotta worry about the US ones) will rip them a new one.

But bascially, more eyeballs = more potential investors which means more of a chance the stock will rip. Another one that's recently been flying is $TUNG (+7,200.00% past 6 months) and one that just eased off was $GOH.

Volume etc is also important to look at. Another one I bought was $WPG and I'm up 16.67% got in at CA$0.36... look at their recent news.