OTC Markets Group dominates the world of unlisted stock data, bringing openness, transparency, and connectivity to new heights with robust financial information and technology services that drive home maximum situational awareness to investor and company alike. Drilling down to rock-bottom price transparency across some 10k OTC securities, the OTCM platform is enabled by wholly-owned subsidiary OTC Link LLC’s OTC Link® ATS platform.
OTC Link provides full interdealer quotation and messaging capabilities, linking together broker-dealers that provide liquidity and execution services. With a comprehensive suite of tools and services for performance tracking, price transparency visualization, price discovery, and U.S. securities regulatory compliance, the company has become the destination of choice for a huge range of companies, from sizeable international conglomerates, to small, development-stage companies.
This broad spectrum of securities is quantified into one of three distinct categories based on the reporting method (SEC or Alternative) and disclosure category (current, limited, or no information). The OTC Market Tier system’s top tier is OTCQX® The Intelligent Marketplace, which is reserved for the securities most worthy of investor attention and which are characterized by the best financial standards, having sound operating profiles, rigorous disclosure practices, and most importantly, a strong drive to actively engage investors. OTCQX brings the same settling/clearing procedure as with any U.S. NASDAQ or NYSE stock to a fully electronic trading environment via all major online brokerage firms like E*TRADE, Fidelity, Schwab, Scottrade, and TD Ameritrade.
OTCQB® The Venture Marketplace is the second OTC Market Tier, and is comprised of companies current with U.S. regulatory reportage, while not requiring financial/qualitative standards. OTC Pink® tier, Current Information companies have at least made their filings accessible by the public via the OTC Disclosure & News Service (in accordance with either the International Reporting Standard or the Alternative Reporting Standard). The OTC Pink category may include shell companies and ones with unaudited financials, or development-stage companies with materially very little to no operations and is essentially a ripe field of highly speculative plays with potential for huge returns.
Subsets of the OTC Pink® Tier are sorted by the discrete information level, with Limited Information (economically distressed companies with trouble reporting, or who will not meet the adequate current information standards policy) coming next, featuring companies that have limited financial data within at least six months on either the OTC Disclosure & News Service, or the SEC’s EDGAR system. The No Information category is for companies unable, or simply unwilling, to disclose public information to regulators, exchanges, or OTC Markets Group itself. With any reported information occurring beyond a period of six months, companies in the No Information category may include defunct entities or companies that have otherwise gone dark, or bear highly questionable management/disclosure practices.
The Grey Market (unlisted, unquoted, and untraded on any exchange) and Caveat Emptor (buyer beware; for public interest concerns like a spam campaign, spurious stock promotion, pending investigation of fraud, regulatory suspension, or disruptive corporate behavior) designations round out the lineup of security categories in the system. It is easy to see the how OTC Markets has risen to become an industry standard when we look at the extremely granular approach taken to creating a solution that delivers highly intelligent trading via any broker at an optimum price, while simultaneously empowering companies and investors alike through readily available information of immediately ascertainable quality/fidelity.
The OTC Intelligence® service is a powerful suite of compliance and communication tools bundled together with the very best in business intelligence solutions and investor relations technology, for everything from PR/Financials publication and real-time data, to regulatory compliance and real-time market activity analysis.
The OTC Disclosure & News Service is really like a central backbone for huge volumes of data to come out from non-SEC reporting companies and it’s also a superb means for companies to cultivate market transparency, helping to ignite external market making and supercharge their stock’s liquidity. By disseminating press releases and financial reports rapidly to the markets, highly-engaged companies can accelerate investor awareness.
Real-Time Level 2 Quotes offer penetrating depth of insight with bid, ask, and size at the fingertips for subscribing companies (and a feed is also made available for subscribing company websites to integrate using the technology’s full API). OTC Markets even helps companies comply with Blue Sky laws via their Blue Sky Monitoring Service (upgrade from the default Blue Sky Snapshot), giving companies a no-hassle solution for complex state-by-state compliance and granting huge assurances to broker-dealers that they can easily recommend the security to clients.
The recent announcement that financial data analytics powerhouse EDGAR Online, Inc. launched their OTC Fundamental Data Service, an OTC market dataset specifically designed to facilitate information distribution on non-SEC disclosure companies (developed in close partnership with OTCM), will bring this new pipeline to both the OTC Markets Group website and Yahoo! Finance quote pages. EDGAR Online will drive the new dataset out through its own I-Metrix Pro platform and web services, as well as via relationships with other authorized financial data platforms, bringing a whole new paradigm of transparency to the OTC space and giving those companies even broader access to potential investors.
For more information on OTC Markets Group Inc., please visit the company’s website at: www.OTCMarkets.com
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