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Strategies & Market Trends : Ask Vendit Off-Topic Questions -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: EepOpp who wrote (8593)	5/11/2005 7:47:20 AM
From: rrufff	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 8752

Hi e - o - not a silly question at all. I've been doing this stuff for several decades (started with my teenage stash of dough) and I'm still learning from e.g. Vendit and others. There are 2 sites appropriately named pinksheets.com and otcbb.com which explain things much better but here is my not so brief summary. Neither are "exchanges" like NYSE, ASE and NASDAQ, where stock is "exchanged." They are really bulletin boards of quotes (hence the BB). The market makers for a particular stock list their quotes. They don't have to show your bid (or offer) or mine even if we are willing to give a better bid. There are rules about their having to honor those bids or asks with certain minimums depending on, inter alia, price. To be on OTC BB, a company has to be fully filing with the SEC, i.e., registration statement and all the quarterly statements, including an annual audited statement and other requirements required in the forms. So there is some credibility in being on OTC BB that there is not on the pinksheets. I find the key being the number of shares outstanding. On the pink sheets, you could have massive dilution and never learn about it. All you see is selling with longs claiming it's manipulation and bashers claiming it's management and touts. Probably is both LOL. The otcbb is run by the Nasdaq but not part of nasdaq. That's kind of a goofy statement but basically they treat it as the young bastard in the family and don't want to say much. Pinksheets.com is a private company that publishes its own bulletin board for quotes. It gets its name from, and back in the days when I was a teenager I used to get them, publishing its quote daily on a stack of pink sheets. Pinksheets.com is electronic and obviously a huge improvement. Foreign companies will often have quotes listed on the pinksheets even though they may be as credible as stocks on the US exchanges. Even pinksheet companies are supposed to file a registration statement with required information if there are more than 300 shareholders of record. They seem to get around this by claiming that "street name" securities at a broker are all in 1 name. There is a relatively new rule 2-11 that pinksheets.com is now emphasizing and that is that they will not publish quotes unless there is compliance. The intent is to get information to the public with unaudited statements and changes in capital structure. There is a piggyback exception which seems to be preventing some free flow of information imo. Anyway, probably too much information and, as I said, this is my own summary. Go to the websites for better and more accurate info. Ciao..