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by xyst 1935 days ago
these are penny stocks, not surprised. actually most of them are sub-penny stocks. surprised they are still listed for public trading.

very easy to do a "pump and dump" scheme especially in the digital or social media age

1 comments

They're on OTC (over the counter) markets, see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTC_Markets_Group

This isn't NYSE or NASDAQ. Not all retail brokerages support OTC markets although it's become much more common in the past year or two. Even then it's usually partial support. Here's the instrument list https://www.otcmarkets.com/corporate-services/company-direct...

They've been generally discouraged (and thus not supported) for retail investors due to their complexity and risks, similar to derivatives and futures, which are still quite exotic to find in retail brokerages

You can also get foreign stocks over the counter (select by country from the link above). There's an ADR 30 similar to the DJIA index. You've likely heard of many of them https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OTCM_QX_ADR_30_Index . You can say, invest in Lenovo or Fujitsu via OTC. It's not everything, but it's the ones people are generally interested in.

It's exotic because if Lenovo doesn't move but say the Yuan does, then your dollar value does too. Also there's different fee schedules often for foreign investors (that's you here), etc. The complexity tries to be smoothed out by the brokerages (firstrade has offered otc since 2010, recommended if you want to give OTC a try* ) but it's not as simple as buying a bit of General Motors

And lastly, some, like Taiwan Liposome Company (TLC), get traded on NASDAQ using ADR schemes (https://www.investopedia.com/terms/a/adr.asp)

* - shameless signup referral for a free stock: https://share.firstrade.com/CHRISTOPHVR08 ... If you were going to try it anyways, might as well