Zecco

[Frank0051]

I realize it's interpreted to be legal, but the SEC would prefer it not to be. There was a HUGE story two years ago or so in several of the national papers about shelf companies, penny scams, etc. Mainly revolving around Montana or Utah or one of those states where there was like over 500 shelf companies at one address. Basically the argument was if you wanted to be a publicly traded company, you should have to register, report, and comply with the rules in place. If you aren't willing to bare the costs associated with that, you shouldn't be bothering attempting to get access to the public equity market. And, I would argue they are generally right: the public equity market is for people that are trading far away from your company, so they NEED honest, transparent companies that file and comply with the law because they don't have the same ability for oversight as private investors in a private company (who are usually close to the action) would.

Anyways, the whole point of the story was FINRA and the SEC were going to start cracking down on these because they believed they were counter to the mission of transparency they had and the Securities laws on the books. As you can see, this has clearly what has happened since between the SEC microcap conference, the changes at DTCC regarding hedging, etc. And, OTC Markets seems to have gotten the message too, hence why they have been doing such an awesome job categorizing the market and just received ATS status. And, also why the OTC BB (FINRA's old bulletin board) is largely irrelevant - because FINRA was largely told by the SEC to get out of the game of OTC listing.

In any case, what's going to be interesting is to see what impact the JOBS Act has on any of this.