Micro-Cap Leaders: Screening the Smallest Names for Relative Strength

Key takeaways · 6

1. 01captier buckets every stock into one of six market-cap tiers, nano through mega. It measures size in dollars; float measures supply in shares. The two overlap in practice, but they are separate fields, and a screen that reaches for one when it means the other will return the wrong list.
2. 02The hero command, leaders captier=micro rs>90, restricts the wide RS matrix to the micro-cap tier before it ranks anything, so a name only has to out-run the rest of the micro-cap universe, not the largest companies in the market.
3. 03Float and cap tier can point in opposite directions. A micro-cap company with almost nothing locked up can carry a float percentage near 100%, and a company sitting comfortably in the mid-cap tier can still show a float under 40 million shares if a founder or early investor kept most of the equity.
4. 04On the 2026-07-09 close, the No. 2 row in leaders rs>90 float<40m was BNY, Bank of New York Mellon, trading $384.2 million a day. A mega-cap bank that cleared a float ceiling a cap-tier screen would have stopped cold. Float alone doesn't know what a company is worth.
5. 05Some of that same board's thinnest names (ELOX at $332,000 in daily dollar volume, TJGC at $1.5 million, DWSN at $582,000) read like exactly the kind of company captier=micro exists to isolate, even though that particular list came from a float filter, not a cap-tier one.
6. 06Cap tier alone is not a liquidity read. Pair captier=micro rs>90 with a dollarvol floor before trading the list. The smallest companies by market cap are also frequently the thinnest by turnover. Every reading is end-of-day and reports a condition, never a recommendation.

The terminal buckets every stock into one of six cap tiers: nano, micro, small, mid, large, mega, running from the tiniest listed companies up through the handful of mega-caps that anchor the indices. Each tier is a market-cap bracket, not a share count and not a price. A stock's tier can change over a year without a single share of float moving, simply because the price did.

leaders captier=micro rs>90 takes the wide leadership board and restricts it to the micro tier before it ranks anything, then reads relative strength inside that narrower field. A name in the list does not have to out-rank the largest companies in the market to show up. It only has to out-rank the other companies the terminal already considers micro. That is a materially different bar than rs>90 run against the whole universe, and it is the reason the tier filter comes first in the command.

captier sorts by market cap into six tiers. Float, on a separate axis, counts tradeable shares. A stock's row on one ladder doesn't fix its row on the other.

The float-based sibling to this screen, leaders rs>90 float<40m, ran 100 rows deep on the 2026-07-09 close, and its own list makes the case for keeping the two fields separate better than any hypothetical could. The No. 2 row was BNY, Bank of New York Mellon, trading $384.2 million a day. A mega-cap bank by any reasonable measure, sitting inside a screen built to find thin, small-supply names. Nothing about float<40m checks what a company is worth; it only checks how few of its shares are unrestricted, and apparently that can be true of a bank with a market cap in the tens of billions.

Flip to the other end of that same list and the fit runs the opposite way. ELOX traded $332,000 that day, TJGC $1.5 million, DWSN $582,000. Thin float and thin dollar volume together, the kind of company captier=micro is built to catch directly rather than as a coincidence of a float ceiling. That list came from a float filter, not a cap-tier one, so it is a hint rather than a confirmed reading, but it is the kind of hint the two fields are supposed to converge on far more often than they diverge, the way BNY just did.

Picture two companies, for illustration and not real tickers. Company A carries a market cap that sits squarely in the micro tier, and its founders sold down almost all of their stake at the IPO: nothing locked up, nothing held back. Its float percentage runs close to 100%. By cap tier it is micro; by float percentage it is about as loose as a float gets. The two readings agree here, but only by coincidence, not by rule.

Company B is a different shape. Its market cap comfortably clears the mid-cap threshold, but a founder kept the majority of the equity at the IPO and has not sold since. The float (the share count actually free to trade) comes out under 40 million shares, thin enough to clear the float<40m screen covered elsewhere in this cluster, even though the company itself is not small by any cap-tier reading. A low float and a mid-cap company are not a contradiction; they are just two different fields answering two different questions about the same stock.

Cap tier answers a size question. It says nothing about whether a name trades enough on an ordinary day to actually build or exit a position in. The same thin-float names surfaced two sections back (ELOX at $332,000, DWSN at $582,000) are exactly the shape a captier=micro screen will also tend to turn up: real market-cap smallness paired with real turnover thinness, because the two conditions travel together often at the very bottom of the size ladder.

The fix is the same one covered in the low-float liquidity read: add a dollarvol floor. leaders captier=micro rs>90 dollarvol>10m keeps the cap-tier and relative-strength conditions and stacks a turnover minimum on top, so a name clearing the screen is small by market cap, strong by relative strength, and provably tradeable, all from one line.

captier, float, fp, and dollarvol answer four different questions about the same stock, and the terminal keeps them separate on purpose instead of flattening everything into one "small stock" label. Read a name across all four (how big it is priced, how many shares can trade, what fraction of the company that represents, how much money actually moves through it in a day) and you get a fuller picture than any single field gives you alone. That is the same discipline this whole cluster keeps coming back to.

Open the terminal and run leaders captier=micro rs>90 for tonight's board, then stack on a dollarvol floor before you trade off it. Pro costs $28 a month, grandfathered for anyone who joins now, so that price does not move even if the list price does later. What comes back is end-of-day and point-in-time honest: which names are small and strong. Not what to do about it.

Frequently asked questions

Keep reading

• Low-Float LeadersThe float-count screen this cap-tier command runs alongside: thin share count instead of small market cap, and where the two lists overlap.
• Low Float, Still LiquidThe dollar-volume floor a micro-cap screen needs just as much as a float screen does, so the smallest names you find are ones you can actually trade.
• Float PercentA third axis again: what fraction of a company's shares are actually public, independent of both float count and cap tier.
• Float & SupplyThe umbrella guide: what float is, how it differs from shares outstanding, and why thin supply amplifies a stock's moves.
• Open the terminalRun leaders captier=micro rs>90 yourself and see tonight's smallest names by market cap posting the strongest relative strength.