Nasdaq and Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB) trade on a Bid and Ask format. Bid is price an investor is willing to pay for a stock. Ask is price that a shareholder is willing to sell stock.

The spread is monetary difference between Bid & Ask price. A stock with a bid of ten cents and an ask of twenty-five cents has a spread of fifteen cents. If spread is wide, for instance a bid of twenty-five cents and an ask of two dollars, few shares trade. If all other factors are equal, a narrow spread increases stock's trading volume. You can use spread to regulate trading volume.

If there's a Bid, without an Ask, share price is likely to move up. This is a situation where buyers are seeking to form a market. If there's an Ask without a Bid, stock will collapse.

Trading volume equals liquidity in a stock. Most shareholders are locked into Penny Stocks. They can't sell at a profit, without depressing price of stock. To create illusion of liquidity, some companies do round robin or wash trades. The insiders trade stock among themselves. The goal is to attract investors by showing high volume trading. Stock brokers love wash trades. However, practice doesn't create a strong shareholder base.

Clean shells don't exist. Among dirtiest of dirty shells are non-reporting shells. A shell is a company that's trading but lacks assets. Usually, private company buys shell and puts their business into it. It rarely works out well for private company.

As I read Section 5 of 1933 U. S. Securities Act, only American stock that should be publicly traded are shares of companies reporting to U. S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The National Association of Securities Dealers (NASD) didn't share my view of need to be a "reporting" company to trade on Over-the-Counter Bulletin Board (OTCBB). In 1998, they changed their minds. In January 1999, NASD announced that they would be delisting about 3,400 OTCBB companies that weren't "reporting" to SEC. The delisting will start in July 1999. The companies will be delisted by trading symbol starting with AA. The last of companies will be delisted in 2000.