Penny stock
category of stocks sold over-the-counter at low per-share prices
In American economics, penny stocks are common shares of small public companies that trade for less than $5 per share.
The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) uses the term "penny stock" to refer to a security, a financial instrument which represents a given financial value, issued by small public companies that trade at less than $5 per share. Prior to the SEC's classification, penny stocks referred to shares that traded for "pennies on the dollar".
In countries other than the United States, where stock prices are denoted in local currencies, a US$1.00 value does not have any necessary implication. In China, for example, it is common for initial public offerings of large companies to have an offer price of 10–40 Rmb per share, the equivalent of US$1.50–5.50 per share. For example, Yonz Technology Co. Ltd. raised US$191 million by going public on the Shanghai Stock Exchange in June 2024 at an offer price of 23.35 Rmb per share, the equivalent of a little over US$3.00 per share.
Trade
Over-the-counter exchanges that list penny stocks include OTC Link LLC (which is owned by OTC Markets Group, Inc., formerly known as Pink OTC Markets Inc.) and formerly the OTC Bulletin Board (which was a facility of FINRA). Penny stocks can also trade on securities exchanges, including foreign securities exchanges.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1939224. The Library of Congress control number is sh88001655. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Penny stock” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.