01
Trading OTC stocks
Off-exchange trading has its own tiers, its own disclosure levels and its own quote behavior.
01, 05
Five pages along the chain
02
Penny stock mechanics
What the price level itself changes: tick behavior, spread as a percentage, and the rules that attach below a dollar.
03
Trading and investing as mechanics
Not a temperament question. Holding period changes settlement, taxation and which account rules apply.
04
How a stablecoin holds a peg
Redemption, reserves and arbitrage: the three mechanisms that keep a fixed-value token near its target.
05
Feeless ledger mechanics
A ledger with no transaction fee has to answer the spam question some other way. This is how.
The chain, in order
An instruction leaves your account, reaches a routing decision, meets a quote, becomes a fill, and then waits for settlement before ownership moves. Every link in that chain can change what you receive. The routing decision determines which venue and which counterparty; the quote determines the price band; the tier of the security determines how much you were able to know beforehand; the settlement cycle determines when the proceeds are genuinely spendable. These pages are ordered along that chain rather than by difficulty.
Quotes are a range, not a price
A single quoted price is a simplification of two numbers: the highest price a buyer is publicly willing to pay and the lowest a seller will accept. The distance between them is the spread, and it is a real cost paid by whoever crosses it. On a heavily traded large company the spread can be a single cent; on a thin OTC listing it can be several percent of the price. The mechanism is identical in both cases. Only the proportion has changed, and the proportion is what matters.
Tiers are disclosure regimes, not quality grades
Off-exchange markets sort securities into tiers according to how much current information the issuer publishes. That is a disclosure classification, and reading it as a quality score is the most common mistake made about this corner of the market. A tier tells you what you are entitled to know before trading. It does not tell you whether the business is sound, and no tier ever claimed to.
Why the ledger pages belong here
Two of these five pages describe token designs rather than equities, and they earn the place by answering execution questions. A stablecoin's peg is not a promise; it is the observable result of a redemption mechanism and the arbitrage that mechanism enables, and it slips exactly when redemption is doubted. A feeless ledger cannot charge for transactions, so it has to price spam some other way, and following where that cost went is a settlement-design question. Both pages stop at the mechanism. Neither has a view on what any token is worth.
FAQ
Execution questions people arrive with
Why are two crypto pages in an execution section?
Because both are execution questions rather than price questions. A stablecoin peg is held by a redemption and arbitrage mechanism, and a feeless ledger is a settlement design. Neither page discusses what a token is worth or whether to hold one; both describe how the machinery is supposed to behave, which is the same thing the equity pages do.
What does settlement actually mean for me?
It is the day ownership and cash genuinely change hands, which is not the day you traded. US equities settle one business day after the trade, written T+1. Until settlement the proceeds of a sale are not fully yours, and using them can create a good-faith violation in a cash account: one of the most common surprises for new accounts, and a pure mechanics problem.
Is an OTC listing a warning sign?
It is a fact about where a security trades, not a verdict on the company. The OTC market has tiers with very different disclosure requirements, and a foreign company with a full home listing can appear in the same venue as a shell with no current filings. The tier and the filing status are the things to read, and both are published.
Does the price level of a share tell me anything?
On its own, almost nothing about the business — but a good deal about the mechanics of trading it. At low prices the bid-ask spread becomes large as a percentage of the price, one tick is a bigger proportional move, and certain rules and platform restrictions attach. Those are the effects the penny-stock page describes.