What are NSCC illiquid charges?
NSCC illiquid charges are charges that apply to the trading of low-priced over-the counter (OTC) securities with low volumes. Open net buy quantity represents the total unsettled share amount per stock at any given time during a 3-day settlement cycle. Open net buy quantity must be less than 5,000,000 shares per stock for your entire firm Basically, you can't hold a long position of more than 5 million shares in an illiquid OTC stock without facing a fee. You'll still be assessed this fee if you accumulate a long position of this size by breaking your purchase up into multiple transactions. Open net sell quantity represents the total unsettled share amount per stock at any given time during a 3-day settlement cycle. Open net sell quantity must be less than 10% percent of the 20-day average volume If you attempt to sell a number of shares greater than 10% of the stock's average volume over the last 20 days, you'll also be assessed a fee. The first link I included above is just an example, but it makes the important point: you may still be assessed a fee for trading OTC stocks even if your account doesn't meet the criteria because these restrictions are applied at the level of the clearing firm, not the individual client.  This means that if other investors with your broker, or even at another broker that happens to use the same clearing firm, purchase more than 5 million shares in an individual OTC stock at the same time, all of your accounts may face fees, even though individually, you don't exceed the limits. Technically, these fees are assessed to the clearing firm, not the individual investor, but usually the clearing firm will pass the fees along to the broker (and possibly add other charges as well), and the broker will charge a fee to the individual account(s) that triggered the restriction. Also, remember that when buying OTC/pink sheet stocks, your ability to buy or sell is also contingent on finding someone else to buy from/sell to. If you purchase 10,000 shares one day and attempt to sell them sometime in the future, but there aren't enough buyers to buy all 10,000 from you, you might not be able to complete your order at the desired price, or even at all.
index ETF tracks indented index (if fund manager spend all money on Premium Pokemon Trading Cards someone must cover resulting losses) Most Index ETF are passively managed. ie a computer algorithm would do automatic trades. The role of fund manager is limited. There are controls adopted by the institution that generally do allow such wide deviations, it would quickly be flagged and reported. Most financial institutions have keyman fraud insurance. fees are not higher that specified in prospectus Most countries have regulation where fees need to be reported and cannot exceed the guideline specified. at least theoretically possible to end with ETF shares that for weeks cannot be sold Yes some ETF's can be illiquid at difficult to sell. Hence its important to invest in ETF that are very liquid. "In the US, if your monthly statement was issued by the credit card company on January 1 and it showed a balance of $1000, then a payment must be made towards that balance by January 25 or so, not February 1 as you say, to keep the card in good standing. The minimum payment required to keep the card in good standing is specified in your monthly statement, and failure to meet this requirement can trigger various consequences such as an increase in the interest rate charged by the credit card company. With regard to interest charges, whether your purchase of $2000 on  January 3 is charged interest or not depends entirely on what happened the previous two months.  If you had paid both your monthly statements dated November 1 and December 1 of the previous year in full by the their respective due dates of November 25 and December 25, and the $1000 balance on the January 1 statement is entirely due to purchases (no cash advances) made in December, then you will not be charged interest on your January purchase of $2000 as long as you pay it off in full by February 25 (the charge will appear on your February 1 statement). But, if you had not paid your December 1 statement in full by December 25, then that $1000 billed to you on January 1 will include  purchases made during December finance charges on the unpaid balance from the previous month  plus finance charges on the purchases made during December. The finance charges will continue to accumulate during January until such time as you pay off the bill in full (these charges will appear on your February 1 statement), hopefully by the due date of January 25. But even if you pay off that $1000 in full on January 25, your charge of $2000 on January 3 will start to accumulate finance charges as of the day it hits the account and these finance charges will appear on your February 1 statement.  If you paid off that $1000 on January 10, say, then maybe there will be no further finance charges on the $2000 purchase on January 3 after January 10 but now we are getting into the real fine print of what your credit card agreement says. Ditto for the case when you pay off that $1000 on January 2 and made the $2000 charge on January 3. You most likely will not be charged interest on that $2000 charge but again it depends on the fine print. For example, it might say that you will be charged interest on the average of the daily balances for January, but will not be charged interest on purchases during the February cycle (unless you miss the February 25 payment and the whole cycle starts all over again). As a general rule, it takes two monthly cycles of payment in full by the due date before one gets into the state of no finance charges for new purchases and effectively an ""interest-free"" loan of $2000 from January 3 (date of purchase) till February 25 (due date of payment).  Matters become more complicated when cash advances are taken from a credit card which are charged interest from the day they are taken but don't trigger finance charges on new purchases or the so-called ""zero percent balance transfer offers"" are accepted." You definitely cannot be guaranteed to get the bid or ask if you are selling more than are available/desired at those prices. What prices you do get depends on who is watching that contract and how willing they are to trade with you. This question is not much different from the question of whether you can easily get into or out of a large position in an illiquid small stock easily.  You can get out quickly if you are willing to take pennies on the dollar, or you may get a reasonable price if you take a long time to get out of (or into) your position.  You can't normally do both. In general taking large positions in illiquid assets is not something people want to do without lining up a buyer/seller beforehand.  Instead see if you can achieve your objective with liquid investments. &gt; If the buyside was showing demand, what's wrong with HFT for reacting with supply?  In my example, HFT isn't actually adding supply/liquidity.  They're just grabbing it and flipping it.  &gt; The example you gave is akin to me going from car dealership to car dealership yelling loudly about what car I want and the price I'd like it at - would you be upset if someone heard you and decided to sell their car to you later down the line?   Not the same.  The equivalent would be me yelling about wanting to buy a Porsche 911, and you buying them all before I can finish my own purchase, then offering to resell them to me at a higher price.  &gt;In this case, the buy side trader is being stupid.   Maybe - certainly if all this could be eliminated by avoiding market orders.  This is a major critique many people have with Brad K. Instead of serially going from exchange to exchange, he could have sent orders to all exchanges at the same time (parallel!) and likely received much better prices.   He did do this at his time at RBC - sent orders to all exchanges at once.  The result would be apparently liquidity (asks at the market) disappearing and his orders getting filled at higher prices.  &gt;In my opinion, the HFT player here is simply facilitating price discovery by reacting to demand - as a market maker that's his job.  I think that's a misinterpretation of what these particular HFTs are doing.  &gt;Here's a good article. Let me know what you think.  Interesting.  It certainly goes against a lot of what Lewis wrote.  And I suppose that's the problem... very few of us are actually qualified to say what is actually true.  I know little about market structure and, as I said, have no involvement in high liquidity stocks.  The fund managers next door to me also trade pretty illiquid stuff that I strongly doubt any HFT ever touches, and they're value investors anyway, not arb HFs or something. All openly traded securities must be registered with the SEC and setup with clearing agents.  This is a costly process. The cost to provide an electronic market for a specific security is negligible.  That is why the exchange fees per electronic trade are so small per security.  It is so small in fact that exchanges compensate price makers partially at the expense of price takers, that exchanges partially give some portion of the overall fee to those that can help provide liquidity. The cost to provide an open outcry market for a specific security are somewhat onerous, but they are initiated before a security has any continual liquidity to provide a market for large trades, especially for futures. Every individual option contract must be registered and setup for clearing. Aside from the cost to setup each contract, expiration and strike intervals are limited by regulation.  For an extremely liquid security like SPY, contracts could be offered for daily expiration and penny strike intervals, but they are currently forbidden. They didn't report it was six figures a month, but I work in the industry and know that is the minimum cost for this type of service.  Putting Auto credit freezes on everyone seems like a good idea but I imagine the lenders would go up in arms if that happens because it would hault all new consumer debt. Here's a reality check. They likely cost on the order of a few million/yr, which is small potatoes compared to what Taibbi makes it sound like. They got caught, and are going to jail.  Since Taibbi exggerates at every turn, and demonstrably so, I do not trust his reporting. The bid riggers were charged with corrupting *dozens* of bids from 1999 to 2006. Know how many bids were performed in that time? I challenge you to find out. I bet there was more than dozens issued over that 7 year period. In fact, since there appear to be 400B in new bonds issues a year and the one mentioned in the story was for 300M, if that is representative of the sizes then there are over 1,000 issued a year, for 7000 or so over that period. They corrupted *dozens*! Oh the humanity.  Feel free to correct any of these numbers as you see fit.  Reading the actual PDF from the charges, one finds that the fraud was no where near as egregious as the Taibbi story makes it out to be.  [Here](http://www.justice.gov/atr/cases/f261600/261602.htm) is the indictment, and [here is the DOJ](http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/May/12-at-620.html) press release. [Here's](http://www.bondbuyer.com/issues/121_88/cdr-financial-bid-rigging-trial-1039416-1.html) article reporting on the trial with no where near the sensationalism that Taibbi lives for, an article that actually reports *facts* from the case and makes no innunendo. [Here's](http://www.fbi.gov/newyork/press-releases/2012/three-former-financial-services-executives-convicted-for-roles-in-conspiracies-involving-investment-contracts-for-the-proceeds-of-municipal-bonds) FBI press release. Not a single one of these sources that actually had something to do with the investigation, trial, and conviction includes anything near what Taibbi writes.  In fact, other than Taibbi's story and those reporting on it, it appears this is not all the big banks in cahoots to defraud poor bond markets, but a few bad apples that got caught and are getting appropriate punishment.  Let me ask you - how much money did they take? The *total* market appears to be 400B in new sales. Some of the charges included something like changing a 5.04% instrument to a 5% instrument, for an item in a 300 million dollar range. If they reaped the entire difference (which is not likely since there were bid rigging which returns far less the the difference in the rigged bid) that comes to 120K/yr for one of dozens. Taibbi himself writes they may have made up to 87K/yr on that one. Wooo - massive theft!. If all were like that, then dozens is approximately 48 * 87k/yr = 4 million a year. The biggest number for stolen money in any of the actual court documents I have seen ranges in the 50-100K range.   Please provide better evidence *from actual court documents* and not Taibbi style hearsay. Until then I provided you a reality check. A rather good IRS paper on the topic states that a donation of a business' in-kind inventory would be  Under IRC 170(e)(1), however, the fair market value must be   reduced by the amount of gain that would not be long-term capital gain if the   property had been sold by the donor at the property's fair market value (determined   at the time of the contribution). Under this rule, deductions for donated inventory   are limited to the property's basis (generally its cost), where the fair market value   exceeds the basis.  There are references to IRC regulations in a narrative context you may find helpful: This paper goes on for 16 pages describing detailed exceptions and the political reasons for the exceptions (most of which are concerned with encouraging the donation of prepared food from restaurants/caterers to hunger charities by guaranteeing a value for something that would otherwise be trashed valueless); and a worked out example of fur coats that had a cost of goods of $200 and a market value of $1000.