Tom,
Been a futures floor trader, stock/options trader after going through the '87 crash as a stockbroker.
Penny stocks trade for those prices for a reason - that's what they're worth. People are attracted to them because they're cheap, and because every once in a blue moon some hype cause the price to explode upwards, after which it promptly crashes.
My advice would be to avoid these and the Forex market like the plague. If you want to dabble less expensivley, try options on decent, exchange-listed stocks. Yuo will have to spend time learning to analyse the underlying stock to know how to trade the option, though.