TIP811: OTC Markets (OTCM): A Picks and Shovels Play in Modern Capital Markets w/ Kyle Grieve & Shawn O'Malley

“That company is OTC Markets, and here's a wild fact. The platform they run covers over 12,000 secondurities, more than both major exchanges combined, yet the whole operation runs on fewer than a 130 people.”

“I think it would be fair to say that OTC Markets Group is very much a quasi monopoly. So you have the New York Stock Exchange and you have the NASDAQ as competitors, but OTCM is really the only alternative if you want to access U. S. Markets without the very strict listing restrictions and fees that come with those primary exchanges. And beyond that, if you're too small of a business, the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq just simply won't serve you and that leaves OTC Markets as your only option.”

“So in 2025, OTCM had $33,600,000 of customer prepayments sitting as non interest bearing current liabilities on the balance sheet. Now this essentially makes OTCM a negative working capital business, which is actually highly favorable because it means that OTCM's customers provide zero cost financing annually and persistently.”

“Cromwell Colson has been a long tenured CEO, having been in that position with OTCM now for twenty nine years. Now given that tenure, you may be thinking he's the founder of the business, but interestingly OTCM has been around since 1913 and was formerly known as the National Quotation Bureau. As of 2026, Cromwell Colson directly owns over 27% of the shares outstanding. So he has tons of skin in the game.”

“It's pretty ironic that one of OTCM's biggest strengths is that they have to rely on these regulatory hurdles. However, if certain regulations were to change, that would obviously open up the ability for other businesses to completely destroy or at least impair OTCM's business model, which I view as a potential existential threat for OTCM.”

“Also in 2018, we had the cannabis mania and in that year there was a huge flood of cannabis businesses that were listing on the OTCQB and OTCQX. This obviously bolstered corporate services revenue and even the pink market had elevated trading volumes. But by 2019, that trend reversed after the cannabis industry fell through. Now looking at 2021, the spike was much more cyclical in nature. With free money just pouring into people's bank accounts, buying stocks was one way to just use that money. And trade people did. So OTC Link electronics communication networks exploded from an average of 11,500 transactions daily in 2020 to an average of 48,000 by 2021.”

“So in 2025, they spent a paltry $1,600,000 in marketing and advertising. So if we assume that 100% of that spend was on corporate services, which I assume is actually even a lower number, then they acquire new issuers at a cost of only $3,700 each. And now their annual fee is around $26,000 meaning that they're getting a ridiculously high return on investment on other advertising spent.”

“So if we apply a 25 times multiple to $55,000,000 that gets us to a market cap of about $1,300,000,000 Enterprise value should be similar given OTCMs minimal net cash and minimal debt position. So if we divide that up by projected shares outstanding in 2030 and we factor in a modest dilution from SBC, this yields a per share value of roughly $113 Now based on today's price of $54 that implies an IRR of about 16% plus you're getting about a 4% dividend yield on top of that.”

“I think it's a really worn out analogy, but people always talk about selling picks and shovels during a gold rush and how that's a better business than actually trying to find gold in a gold rush. And to me, OTC Markets is very much a picks and shovels company for investing in the growth of equity markets in aggregate.”