OTC Markets Gr (OTC:OTCM) reported third-quarter financial results on Thursday. The transcript from the company’s third-quarter earnings call has been provided below.
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Summary
OTC Markets Group reported 7% growth in gross and net revenues for Q3 2026, with a 12% increase year-to-date, driven by strong performance in all business lines.
OTC Link saw a 17% revenue increase due to higher trading volumes. Market Data revenue grew by 7%, and Corporate Services increased by 2%.
Operating expenses rose by 8% in Q3, mainly due to investments in personnel and IT infrastructure.
The company announced a special dividend of $1.75 per share and a quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share, reflecting strong shareholder returns.
Strategic initiatives included developing tokenized and digital asset securities with BitGo, as well as ongoing efforts to modernize regulatory frameworks and achieve broader market recognition.
OTC Markets Group is preparing for increased competition in overnight trading and the entry of NMS exchanges into this market.
The future outlook includes a focus on expanding international securities and engaging more with professional users to enhance market data licensing revenues.
Management remains optimistic about the potential impact of SEC proposals to recognize OTCQX and OTCQB as qualified markets, which could significantly enhance capital raising capabilities.
Full Transcript
OPERATOR
Thank you for standing by and welcome to OTC Markets Group Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and webcast. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear a message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.
Now it’s my pleasure to turn the call to the General Counsel and Chief of Staff, Dan Zinn. Please proceed.
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the OTC Markets Group third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Joining me today are Cromwell Colson, our President and Chief Executive Officer, and Antonia Georgieva, our Chief Financial Officer. Today’s call will be accompanied by a slide presentation. Our earnings press release and the presentation are each available on our website. Certain statements during this call and in our presentation may relate to future events or expectations and, as such, may constitute forward-looking statements.
Information concerning risks and uncertainties that may impact our actual results is contained in the Risk Factors section of our 2025 annual report, which is also available on our website. For more information, please refer to the safe harbor statement on Slide 3 of the earnings presentation. With that, I’d like to turn the call over to Cromwell Colson.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Dan. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us. I will begin by reviewing our third quarter 2026 results at a high level and will then turn to a discussion of our performance and priorities for the year. Gross and net revenues each grew by 7% during the third quarter, up 12% for the first nine months of the year. All three business lines grew revenue during the quarter and our year-to-date results continue to reflect the strength of our interconnected business model.
During the quarter, OTC Link was up 17%, market data increased 7% and corporate services was up 2%. OTC Link continued to lead our growth driven by higher volumes across our ATS platforms even as trading on Moon pulled back during the quarter. With overall activity on our markets increasing, we remain focused on providing trusted, reliable service to support our broker-dealer subscribers. Market data growth this quarter came primarily from professional user licenses and delayed data licenses supported by price increases and new subscribers.
In corporate services, the third quarter marked the first anniversary of the OTC ID Basic market launch, which means our year-over-year comparisons now reflect a full year of OTC ID. Our premium markets continue to grow with OTCQX and OTCQB revenues up 6% and 4% respectively, driven by higher company counts and pricing adjustments. We ended the quarter with 589 OTCQX companies, up 7% from a year ago. We continue to focus on reducing OTCQX churn through product enhancements and education to increase user engagement and overall client success.
With respect to operating expenses, we saw an 8% increase in the third quarter and a 9% year-to-date. Our largest expense remains the investment in our people. It is our job as management to put our resources in the best possible position to achieve positive results for our clients and our shareholders. I remain extremely appreciative of the dedication and client-centric approach our OTC Markets team brings every day. Speaking of our team, I am thrilled to officially welcome Megan McGowan as our EVP of Corporate Services.
In taking leadership of our global sales and success teams, Megan brings expertise working alongside executives at leading public companies, helping them better understand their shareholder base, enhance governance and identify opportunities to engage new investors. As more companies look to expand their US investor reach on our OTCQX, OTCQB and OTC ID markets, Megan’s leadership and insight will be invaluable in shaping how we support growth for our corporate clients and expand our platform’s functionality to improve market quality.
With respect to the strategic initiatives we carried into this year, the OTC ID Basic market has become an established part of our tiered market structure. At a year old, we have seen companies use OTC ID as an entry point to public markets so they can start engaging with investors and complying with securities laws. OTC ID serves as a landing point for companies seeking to stay connected to their market and their investors even when unable to meet our higher market standards.
The increase in new sales and retention on OTCQX and OTCQB can be partly attributed to the introduction of OTC ID and our ability to reach and connect with a greater pool of issuers. Connected companies qualified for trading on our premium markets contributed approximately 24% of the dollar volume during the third quarter. We built our overnight trading capabilities during 2025 and saw that carry into an active first half of 2026. However, NMS volume on our Moon ATS dropped off during the third quarter, and the dynamics will shift again with the impending entry of the NMS exchanges into the overnight market starting in December. We have long recognized the importance of building our operations to serve broker-dealer subscribers as equity markets move to overnight trading.
Our experience with Moon will help us support reliable OTC overnight trading as investor demand expands. Turning to our 2026 initiatives, we continue to prepare for the introduction of tokenized and digital asset securities into our markets. Our strategic alliance with BitGo lays the groundwork for broker-dealers to use OTC Link ATS for tokenized stocks into US regulated markets and provides a model for the settlement and custody infrastructure. The regulatory and legislative environment for digital assets and tokenization is moving forward. While the Clarity Act did not happen, the rules of the road are becoming clearer.
US regulators are diligently working to adopt their rule set so broker-dealers will be able to use blockchain technologies and lawfully trade tokenized securities. Our aim with digital assets tracks our underlying goal for all of our trading services. We stand ready to support our FINRA member broker-dealers, public companies, market data clients and other market participants as they innovate and grow their businesses with these new technologies.
To that end, trading of OTC securities on our markets has maintained record levels throughout the year. Total OTC market dollar volume traded grew to over 670 billion through the end of the third quarter, an increase of more than 27% over the record levels of volume we experienced through this point in 2025. As markets grow, we remain dedicated to providing our subscribers with elegant, reliable and cost-effective, data-driven solutions that improve the connectivity and quality of our markets and to support the continued growth of our clients.
We also spent the third quarter supporting our regulatory agenda and modernizing rule sets. A big focus is increasing the benefits and reducing the burdens of securities laws so we grow the number of public companies, small company capital raising, recognition of our OTCQX and OTCQB markets, and achieving regulatory parity between qualified companies on our markets and those on NMS exchanges are all top priority initiatives. The SEC spent the first half of the year developing and rolling out proposed rules advancing many of these points.
Specifically, the SEC’s proposal for the first time formally recognizes OTCQX and OTCQB as qualifying public trading markets on which issuers can conduct at-the-market offerings. We are committed to working with regulators and our industry partners to make these proposals a reality so they can provide real value for issuers of securities traded on our markets. On the legislative front, we have long advocated for the modernization of rules that would provide domestic OTC securities and ADRs a pathway to margin eligibility. I am pleased to report that the recently introduced Margin Eligibility Modernization Act in Congress would take great strides towards achieving that goal. Seeing that bill introduced represents considerable progress. There is still much more work to be done.
At the beginning of this year, we announced a strategic determination to increase our quarterly dividend to better balance the ratio between quarterly and special dividends. Our strong operating results give us the flexibility to continue returning capital to shareholders while investing in our operations. We have also begun opportunistically buying back shares in the public market. I am pleased to announce that on November 10th our board of directors declared a special dividend, $1.75 per share, and a quarterly dividend of $0.30 per share, each payable in December.
These dividends reflect our ongoing commitment to providing superior shareholder returns. With that, I will turn the call over to Antonia.
OPERATOR
Thank you so much. And as a reminder, to ask a question, press star 11 on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. To remove yourself, press star 11 again. One moment for our first question please. It comes from Steve Silver with Argus Research Corporation. Please go ahead.
Steve Silver (Analyst)
Thanks, operator, and good morning, and congratulations on the special dividend as well as the new leadership for corporate services. So there’s been modestly lower international companies joining OTCQB and QX compared to the two previous quarters. I was hoping you could discuss a little bit about the pipeline you’re seeing internationally and perhaps any of the global capital markets dynamics that are shaping this recent activity given the company’s recent investments for global growth.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Well, thank you, Steve, and Kramel, why don’t you address that question first.
Kramer
Yep, thanks, Steve. For the international companies, we see it as a continuing opportunity because the more that companies traded on our markets act like companies traded on the exchanges in servicing and supporting U.S. investors—and for an international company, that would mean acting like a NYSE-listed ADR issuer or a NASDAQ-listed international biotech company—the better our market quality will be. And as these companies distribute their information to the U.S. and do a baseline of IR activities, that should market quality, mindshare, engagement, demonstration of compliance, so their securities can reach the maximum number of brokers and brokerage accounts. We’ll see our markets grow. So I hope you can understand that getting international companies engaged is incredibly important.
And we had a leadership transition with the team. The managers in those regions have all stepped up to take more ownership of their business. And now we’re excited to bring Megan in who we believe has the skills to be able to power us to an even higher level. And I would not look at what we’ve done in the last six months as an indication of what we plan to be doing going forward. If that answers the question for you, Steve.
Steve Silver (Analyst)
Yeah, I appreciate the color. So one more for me. So it looks like there’s continued healthy subscriber growth among the professional users in the market data licensing, which was already at the high end of the historical range. And you mentioned quarterly fluctuations based on the retail participation in the market, which has been strong for a while now. I’m curious as to whether you guys keep a pipeline into that segment that would provide any visibility around all this variability in the subscriber count.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Kramer, you can address that one as well if you’d like.
Kramer
Yes, Steve. So user counts, both professional and non-professional, tend to follow market volume. One point I would put that’s a little different for our business model is because we have enterprise licenses for broker-dealers. You’ll see in professionals and with non-professional licenses that when a broker-dealer gets to a certain size of licenses, they’ll move to a more cost-effective enterprise license. And with that it does cap some of the growth into the bigger firms.
However, it’s a much stickier license. You know, once someone has that enterprise license, a brokerage firm is going to—it’s pretty sticky on that as long as they’re staying in business. So that’s the understanding of the dynamics for us. At the end of the day, more interest in our securities, higher-quality companies on our markets, more of those companies being engaged to build mindshare with U.S. investors of their U.S. symbol all will build the licenses over time.
Steve Silver (Analyst)
Great. I appreciate the insights and congratulations on all the progress.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, Steve. It’s, you know, we still have lots of exciting things to do.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Our next question comes from Brendan McCarthy with Sidoti and Company.
Brendan McCarthy (Analyst)
Great. Good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions here. I wanted to start off on the SEC proposal to recognize QX and QB as qualified markets that would enable ATM offerings. Can you give us an idea of how you’re thinking about the likelihood of that becoming a reality and maybe the timing of those proposed reforms.
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Sure, and thanks for the question, Brendan. I mean our hope is as soon as possible. You know, the SEC spent really the first half of the year putting out these proposals. There’s a few related proposals that talk about capital formation and small company-related issues. We still see momentum here. There’s a lot of support for particularly those portions of the registered offering reform proposal that lead to increased opportunities for capital raising and particularly the at-the-market offering piece that would recognize OTCQX and OTCQB.
We look at this as, by the way, just one step in a larger set of goals around recognition for those markets. So getting this to final rule stage will be a really impactful move for us, not only for what it means for this rule specifically and the ability for companies to raise money this way, but also the SEC stepping forward to evaluate and publicly recognize those two markets will and should lead the way for other similar recognitions.
Brendan McCarthy (Analyst)
Great. Thanks, Dan. I appreciate it.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
I’d step in, Brendan. This is a very large change and from a functionality standpoint, if companies have been in the capital raising mode and they’re in the smaller, more speculative end, they’ve really been going to NASDAQ or NYSE Amex to a lesser extent. And having our market transform from being a market for secondary trading of companies who raise their capital, which is a very large amount of the world’s capital markets, however, expanding out to have the efficiency of the capital raising is really going to be a game changer over the long term.
What we must understand though is new companies will be coming through because right now most of the companies that are really aggressively raising capital choose to go to NASDAQ if they can get to a certain size. So we’re going to be able to attract, keep, and bring public many more companies because our platform’s going to have more functionality. But it’s not going to be a day one, there’s a million ATM offerings taking place across our market.
Brendan McCarthy (Analyst)
Right. That makes sense. It seems a great growth opportunity for you. I’m just curious as to your conversation. Have you had conversations with QX or QB companies on the initiative or even companies on the pink markets, I guess. Have you had a sense of the feedback from in your subscriber base?
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
I’ll jump in for a second and then I’m sure Cromwell will have comments as well. So I was mentioning kind of the group of proposals around this sort of thing and that includes the proposals around the NASDAQ listing standards and companies, you know, that will be moving off of Nasdaq faster than has been traditionally the case. So we’ve had a lot of interaction with companies around that as well as things like capital raising. And so at this point, at least to the extent that I’m involved, it’s about raising awareness and making sure that companies understand that these proposals are out there and what they mean and that they have the opportunity to take advantage of it. Cromwell, if you have additional thoughts, please go ahead.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yes, if you think about it, when we talk to companies that are on NASDAQ and they struggle with how expensive it is and how bad the capital raising is for smaller companies, even though it’s better as an NMS security than an OTC security, if we level the playing field and then we take our cost effective listing standards that we built so management has more time to focus on their business, we believe it’s a very attractive combination and this is all working together.
The exchange business model is really a branding model where the blue luxury brand of what I would call the Tiffany blue box brand is about selling prestige of every company. And that works for established high quality companies. It does not work for companies that are earlier stage entrepreneurial companies. And in many ways the brands of the exchange may cause the securities to become mispriced. So using our market where we have a different model where we want companies to disclose their risks and trade at an appropriate valuation, a good example is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac trade on our OTCQB market.
There are operational risks that the market prices and they trade fine. So our ability to have a market for companies like that and have them be able to really efficiently raise capital as easy as they can sell shares as easily as they can buy back shares is a game changer. And it’s also going to improve capital raising for smaller NMS securities and newly traded NMS securities. But that’s going to lift, that’s a rising tide of, of capital raising that will lift all different markets and the pie gets bigger.
The network effect. We all will benefit every market operator.
Brendan McCarthy (Analyst)
Understood. Thanks for that detail. Cromwell, one more question from me just on OTC ID subscriber count. Can you talk about some of the puts and takes there? I know it was flat on a sequential basis, I think down a little bit year over year. But are you seeing normal attrition there or the sales cycle picking up? I’m just curious as to what’s driving that subscriber count.
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Maybe Antonia can address some of the numbers behind that. And then again, Cromwell, if you have additional thoughts, you can add.
Antonia Georgieva (Chief Financial Officer)
Thanks for the question, Brandon. As we’ve discussed before, we have a highly automated process for tagging companies as OTC ID based on four primary criteria, whether they’re current in their subscription to the market tier, as well as three qualitative criteria including management certifications, updated company profile, and timely interim and annual filings. So at any point in time if a company fails to meet any of those four criteria, they would get removed from the OTC ID market.
However, there are also various instances of companies fairly quickly curing some of the deficiencies, particularly as it pertains to the timely financials or the management certification or updating their OTC Verify company profile. So as I have mentioned in the past, quarter-end numbers are not always representative of the level of OTC ID subscribers during the periods, so please keep that in mind. Secondly, if you recall, last third quarter was the first quarter following the launch as of July 1st and we had a significant influx of companies formerly on the Pink Limited market upgrading to OTC ID. So the number of 1077 reflects the early days of the product. Since then we’ve seen some seasoning and you’re correct in June we had the same number of 1037 which had stayed as of quarter end again at the same level. But in the interim months we can see meaningful movement of companies in and out of compliance with the requirements for the market tier.
We are still only one year into the product. We will continue to monitor going forward our experience with renewals and other reasons for companies to be on the tier or not and we’ll report what we’re seeing. I would say it’s too early days. I can say that we have so far seen encouraging trends in renewals compared to what we had with Pink Limited companies subscribing to DNS prior to the launch of OTC ID. But again it has been only a year and we’d like to see a bit more history.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
And I think OTC ID really represents that you’re either in or you’re out. And there’s not a lot of the gamesmanship from the trading community and with investors. We hear a lot of frustration that companies can be on exchanges and out of compliance with listing standards and stay on for a very long time. I find it quite unbelievable that a company can file for bankruptcy and they stay on an exchange; a company can engage in multiple reverse splits and they stay listed on an exchange.
We’re much more interested in having standards that add value to market quality and market quality is driven by how those standards drive broker-dealer activities and investor activities and that the ID is always going to have more fluctuations and then over time the use case will also become stronger as companies learn how to use it. And my belief has been that the more quality companies that buy into our premium markets, the more Pink Limited will be a strong indicator to investors that they should discount those shares because the companies are not focused on market quality or their investors.
Brendan McCarthy (Analyst)
Understood. That makes a lot of sense. Thanks everybody. That’s all for me.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thanks, Brendan.
OPERATOR
Thank you so much. Our next question comes from the line of Jonathan Isaac. Please go ahead.
Jonathan Isaac (Analyst)
Hi everyone. How’s it going?
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Great, Jonathan.
Jonathan Isaac (Analyst)
Glad to hear it. I have a few questions regarding your international security mindshare. One way to gauge international or, excuse me, institutional engagement is to look at your number of professional market data subscribers relative to UTP Plan Professional subscribers. That share has grown from about 8% at the end of 2015 to 10% at the end of 2025. Over roughly the same period, your dollar volume more than tripled driven by international securities.
In the fourth quarter of 2025, international securities comprised about 89% of your dollar volume. It seems like there is a disconnect between your growing relevance as a second market for international securities and your degree of institutional engagement. How do you think about building the foundation for broader institutional engagement and what are the biggest bottlenecks? Thank you.
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Thanks, Jonathan. Cromwell, you want to start with that?
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah. Well, my first thought is hiring Megan and getting a fresh set of eyes on what we’re doing well and what we’re not doing well and need to change or stop doing and what we’re not doing to really step up what we’ve become in the trading space into the education and engagement of issuers of international securities. And we really look at internationally because our Link business serves U.S. broker dealers. There are lots of international broker dealers who offer access into the U.S., so we’ll be customers of our market data products.
However, they’ll go through a U.S. broker-dealer who we view as our partners. And that dynamic is just expanding. More and more U.S. broker-dealers are focusing on either building international subsidiaries to directly serve, or many of the platform providers or direct access brokers are connecting out to their peers in other countries. So the way we’ve been building our sales offices is really to have the corporate service sales be there talking to the companies and their advisors and then also our market data sales internationally and having, when we have conversations with local exchanges, going out there to talk both about the data connectivity and the corporate engagement as an alternative. Those are long conversations.
Our team in the EU, the UK/EU team, they’ve made great progress with SIX Group and SIX Group is now putting our team in front of their issuers as an alternative for Swiss listed companies to going to a U.S. exchange is to be SIX listed or Aquis listed in the UK and then have a secondary trading market on OTCQX or OTCQB on the size and educating that environment and that’s, you know, and that is a long road. The regulatory recognitions will help. The path we’ve made of getting more recognitions at the state Blue Sky level and building a path to 100% Blue Sky compliance possibility for companies that can qualify is really important.
And our viewpoint is we’ve always wanted to be able to build a digital platform that lets companies do the same things, the same activities, have the same quality of disclosure, provide the same market updates, go to the same conferences as NMS securities. And if we do that and we’ve got a great trading platform that brings together all the U.S. broker-dealers, we will be able to have comparable market quality for similar securities.
Jonathan Isaac (Analyst)
Thank you. Yeah. As a follow up, Cromwell, you once called OTC Markets the uncola in the mid-2010s. At the time OTC Markets wasn’t the New York Stock Exchange or NASDAQ and frankly what it was had not yet been fully defined. Now it has. OTC Markets has become a leading US market for international securities. How do you frame the company’s structural advantages in attracting and retaining those securities? And how do these advantages hold up or expand if tokenized ADRs lower the cost and complexity of a second market program?
Thank you.
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Go ahead, Kamal.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
So Jonathan, you know the cost and the complexity is lower. Companies are able to use their home country disclosure to service and support their U.S. investors. It’s a huge advantage. Companies can’t be raising capital directly from U.S. investors, so there are not the large placements of shares in the U.S. It builds slowly. However, institutions that invest in international companies, the large institutions—which is where they want the capital from versus the secondary liquidity they want, the breadth of the market—is all of those institutions go to those local markets and they can raise capital there.
So that is what is, I would say, the value quotient in a nutshell. The part of, “Are we fully developed yet?” No. You’re fully developed when everybody knows how to use your service to be highly useful for their own needs on their journey as a public company. And we’re in very early days. Community banks know we’re a much more cost‑effective way to provide an informed and efficient public market for their shareholders at a certain size and level of their business. We have companies that have had ADRs listed on the exchanges who moved to OTCQX, and their IR teams have enjoyed that they can keep doing the same activities to service U.S. investors.
We’ve also seen many of our earliest companies that joined OTCQX that were large‑cap global champions. They had U.S.-based IR teams, highly sophisticated ones, and they wanted to have a platform where they could take ownership of their symbol and, again, do the same activities to serve investors. And they’ve been very successful. But this is very early in understanding across, and that’s why I look at what is the total dollar volume of connected companies and how can we move that. Because when we move the dollar volume of connected companies, those companies will be doing activities that improve market quality for brokers and investors, and that will grow our markets.
Jonathan Isaac (Analyst)
Thank you. I have one more quick follow‑up. When we think about Nasdaq’s path through the state‑by‑state Blue Sky regime, one that Nasdaq annual reports often discussed through the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, how does OTC Markets’ path towards reducing regulatory friction for engaged issuers differ from Nasdaq’s, given OTC Markets’ large international securities presence? Thank you.
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Sure. Thanks, Jonathan. I can start there, and then Cromwell, if you have anything to add, you can hop in at the end. I think certainly towards the end of that cycle you described with Nasdaq, they had a little bit more federal recognition. It’s written into the securities laws in some places, “an automated quotation system,” which always referred to Nasdaq back before they were an exchange. And so we are on that cycle, we’re on that path. Things like the registered offering reform proposal at the SEC recognizing OTCQX and OTCQB are a great step in that more national, that federal understanding.
We’ve had success, as we’ve talked about over the years, working with NASAA, the state securities administrators, and each of the individual states and jurisdictions. We have not achieved a national recognition yet, but certainly an overwhelming number of states that are with us. I think the international angle that you introduced at the end of the question is helpful in engaging, certainly, state regulators who may not always have a full understanding of what our market is or has become. And so instead of looking at a few issuers from their state or whatever historical experience they might have had in their own careers, when you start to introduce Roche and Adidas and Heineken and even some of the larger newer firms that have come on, it gives a different context.
And I think it provides a level of comfort and at least a drive towards understanding what our markets are, which has over time really worked to get people comfortable and have them work towards giving us some of those recognitions.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
And Jonathan, I was going to say something flippant—it’s the difference between walking barefoot on hot coals or walking barefoot on broken glass. Neither is easy. What Nasdaq did for years and what we’re doing, the difference I would say is that Nasdaq, when they started out, had a lot of similarities with us. It is providing a market not for the blue‑chip U.S. domestic companies that are listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It was providing a market for companies that couldn’t list there.
And some of those were not profitable companies back when the New York Stock Exchange required companies be profitable. Some of it was seasoning, some of it was international securities, some of it was smaller companies. And Nasdaq found a place, a use case, for exciting technology, biotech companies, different businesses. And many of those companies grew into a size where they could list on the New York Stock Exchange or the American Stock Exchange.
However, they wanted to stay with Nasdaq; they liked the brand. And then it became a different challenge as they went to become an exchange. Going back to the Uncola—that was Pepsi to the New York Stock Exchange’s Coca‑Cola. Very similar, little nuances, different branding. However, the listing standards, the trading experience became exactly the same. We are following the footsteps of what Nasdaq did because it opened up an opportunity. When they became Pepsi, we were able to be a market for many different types of companies. And as we go through with the state regulators and the SEC, we’re not asking for recognitions for every company.
We’re asking for recognitions of companies that have established a level of financial success, a level of revenues, a level of governance, a level of compliance, a level of registration. If a company achieves a level that is acceptable—and with the states, you know, we built the OTCQX standards off lots of different state Blue Sky rules, the financial standards there, the governance standards, those pieces—once you meet it, you should unlock the benefits that are applicable to companies of that size and type.
And that viewpoint is a lot like what Nasdaq did. It’s doing it, though, in a digital manner, and it’s doing it in a much more complex regulatory world. However, we believe that America will benefit if companies are incentivized to go public, if global companies are incentivized to connect into the U.S. and be compliant, and if there are steps to work your way up. And as you work your way up and become more successful, companies gain more benefits.
Jonathan Isaac (Analyst)
Thank you.
OPERATOR
Thank you. And as a reminder, if you do have a question, simply press star 1 1 to get in the queue. We have a question from the line of Walter Hopkins with 18 Square LLC. Please go ahead.
Walter Hopkins (Analyst at 18 Square LLC)
Thanks for the terrific discussion. My questions have already been covered for the most part, so just a quick one on capital allocation. You raised the regular dividend to 30 cents and kept the special dividend at $1.75. That collectively works out to a high dividend yield, a 5.6% trailing dividend yield as of yesterday. After repurchasing around $6 million of stock in the first half of the year and slowing down in Q3, how are you thinking about the balance between open‑market purchases, the special dividend, and of course any needed internal reinvestment going forward?
Dan Zinn (General Counsel and Chief of Staff)
Thanks, Walter. Cromwell, you want to start with that?
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Yeah. Walter, we’ve always said we’re halfway to Warren Buffett. Our original investor base was a group of very experienced value investors. We look to run the business in a capital‑efficient manner and be profitable because profitable companies can run for infinity, but return capital to investors when we have excess capital. Buying back shares is something that we are now doing. We’re not trying to put a thumb on the market; we’re there in a buyback program.
Ideally, we would find some acquisitions which could deliver a return to shareholders. However, there’s a high bar when your investors are quite competent with investing the money as well. So I would keep messaging that we have a quarterly dividend, and then we get to the end of the year and the board takes a look at how much cash we have and what our special dividend should be, where our business is moving, and incrementally adjust it as we’re able to grow the business over multiple years. However, the special dividend—if we saw an opportunity to invest that money into a business that would be accretive for shareholders—we would not treat the special dividend as sacrosanct, that it always needs to be an amount or going up.
Does that answer the question, Walter?
Walter Hopkins (Analyst at 18 Square LLC)
Yes. Thank you. Appreciate it.
OPERATOR
Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes our Q&A session. I will turn the call back to Cromwell Colson for closing remarks.
Cromwell Colson (President and Chief Executive Officer)
Thank you, operator. I want to thank each of you for joining us today. I encourage you to read our third quarter 2026 report and the earnings press release for more information. Links to both are available on the investor relations page of our website. On behalf of the entire team, we look forward to updating you on our key initiatives that will continue to shape the integrity and competitiveness of the public markets.
OPERATOR
We want to thank everyone for participating in tonight’s conference. You may now disconnect.
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