Curious if anyone else reading this knows about the equivalent of US "pink sheets," publicly traded companies that have either never been listed or have been delisted due to low share price / market capitalization.
Here in the US, you can buy publicly traded companies in the US for a song; in fact, that was the source for the "acquiring" company in a lot of those reverse-acquisitions of the late 2000s / early 2010s: publicly traded companies that had a ticker, but were basically defunct. A company that wanted to go public without the scrutiny of an IPO process could "buy themselves" with the tiny, publicly traded company, thereby getting a ticker and access to retail investors. (This was not a good phenomenon, fwiw, though it definitely anticipated the SPAC craze... which was also not good, for similar reasons.)
Why not good? Gives an investor a chance to invest.
Investment has the risk of loss. You should do your homework before risking the loss!
Gives an investor a chance to invest.
It gives the unwitting a chance to lose their money. “Do your homework” against professionals whose job it is to make your homework as difficult as possible, including the very tactic you seem to be arguing for.
Meanwhile, if things such as SPACs are such solid investments, why are they pulling such weasely stunts to begin with? (A rhetorical question, at least it is to me.)
Yeah; you shouldn't be trading pink sheets if you're an unwitting investor. It's there to make your job as easy as possible. You shouldn't be trading OTC or pink sheets or any of these things.
SPACs can be solid investments. A SPAC is just a reverse acquisition to avoid listing costs, or sometimes because you're putting faith in a capital allocator. Again, investment carries risk of loss. I'm not sure what you're being critical of. Are you saying that we should only allow companies to go public through investment banks taking millions of dollars of fees?
Unlike with memecoins, there's actually an operating company behind these stocks. It's good that they can access capital in public markets.
The problem imo is a lack of enforcement on modern pump and dumps.
The NASDAQ should not become Pancakeswap, Polymarket, or pump.fun. If you want to invest in those products, you know where to find them (and it's not the NASDAQ).