Why some things are traded in an exchange while others are traded OTC
All securities must be registered with the SEC. Securities are defined as (1) The term “security” means any note, stock, treasury stock,   security future, security-based swap, bond, debenture, evidence of   indebtedness, certificate of interest or participation in any   profit-sharing agreement, collateral-trust certificate,   preorganization certificate or subscription, transferable share,   investment contract, voting-trust certificate, certificate of deposit   for a security, fractional undivided interest in oil, gas, or other   mineral rights, any put, call, straddle, option, or privilege on any   security, certificate of deposit, or group or index of securities   (including any interest therein or based on the value thereof), or any   put, call, straddle, option, or privilege entered into on a national   securities exchange relating to foreign currency, or, in general, any   interest or instrument commonly known as a “security”, or any   certificate of interest or participation in, temporary or interim   certificate for, receipt for, guarantee of, or warrant or right to   subscribe to or purchase, any of the foregoing. thus currencies are not defined as securities. While OTC transactions of securities is not outright forbidden, there are numerous regulations issued by the SEC as a result of the 1943 Exchange Act and others that make this difficult and/or costly. Many other securities are exempted from registration thus trade in a way that could be called OTC. Different countries have variances upon US law but are very similar. Any security could be traded OTC, but law prohibits it expressly or in such a way to make it relatively expensive; further, stock options are so tightly regulated that expiration dates, expiration intervals, strike intervals, and minimum ticks are all set by the authorities.
Is my observation that the currency exchange market is indirect correct? Is there a particular reason for this? Why isn't currency traded like stocks? I guess yes. In Stocks its pretty simple where the stock is held with a depository. Hence listing matching is simple and the exchange of money is via local clearing. Currency markets are more global and there is no one place where trades happen. There are multiple places where it happens and is loosely called Fx market place. Building a matching engine is also complex and confusing. If we go with your example of currency pair, matches would be difficult.  Say; If we were to say all transactions happen in USD say, and list every currency as item to be purchased or sold. I could put a trade Sell Trade for Quantity 100 Stock Code EUR at Price 1.13 [Price in USD]. So there has to be a buy at a price and we can match. Similarly we would have Stock Code for GBP, AUD, JPY, etc. Since not every thing would be USD based, say I need to convert GBP to EUR, I would have to have a different set of Base currency say GBP. So here the quantity would All currencies except GBP which would be price. Even then we have issues, someone using USD as base currency has quoted for Stock GBP. While someone else using GBP has quoted for Stock USD. Plus moving money internationally is expensive and doing this for small trades removes the advantages. The kind of guarantees required are difficult to achieve without established correspondence bank relationships. One heavily traded currency pair, the exchange for funds happens via CLS Bank. Every time you buy or sell a share for some price, somebody must have thought that that was exactly the right moment to sell or buy that share at that price (and to trade with you). Every time a trade is made, both sides think they are doing the smart thing. Most of the time, one will turn out to be wrong, the other right. Nothing in your proposed method of trading explains why you would be the side that was right more often. So they'll probably even out. Or maybe there are people in the market who actually do have a slightly better than average method, and you'll be wrong somewhat more often than right. Each trade has transaction costs. If you simply hang on to your shares, that's more or less the same as evening out good trades and bad trades, but without the transaction costs. "Quantitative Easing Explained: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/10/07/130408926/quantitative-easing-explained The short of it is that you're right; the Fed (or another country's Central Bank) is basically creating a large amount of new money, which it then injects into the economy by buying government and institutional debt. This is, in fact, one of the main jobs of the central bank for a currency; to manage the money supply, which in most fiat systems involves slowly increasing the amount of money to keep the economy growing (if there isn't enough money moving around in the economy it's reflected in a slowdown in GDP growth), while controlling inflation (the devaluation of a unit of currency with respect to most or all things that unit will buy including other currencies). Inflation's primary cause is defined quite simply as ""too many dollars chasing too few goods"". When demand is low for cash (because you have a lot of it) while demand for goods is high, the suppliers of those goods will increase their price for the goods (because people are willing to pay that higher price) and will also produce more. With quantitative easing, the central bank is increasing the money supply by several percentage points of GDP, much higher than is normally needed. This normally would cause the two things you mentioned: Inflation - inflation's primary cause is ""too many dollars chasing too few goods""; when money is easy to get and various types of goods and services are not, people ""bid up"" the price on these things to get them (this usually happens when sellers see high demand for a product and increase the price to take advantage and to prevent a shortage). This often happens across the board in a situation like this, but there are certain key drivers that can cause other prices to increase (things like the price of oil, which affects transportation costs and thus the price to have anything shipped anywhere, whether it be the raw materials you need or the finished product you're selling). With the injection of so much money into the economy, rampant inflation would normally be the result. However, there are other variables at play in this particular situation. Chief among them is that no matter how much cash is in the economy, most of it is being sat on, in the form of cash or other ""safe havens"" like durable commodities (gold) and T-debt. So, most of the money the Fed is injecting into the economy is not chasing goods; it's repaying debt, replenishing savings and generally being hoarded by consumers and institutions as a hedge against the poor economy. In addition, despite how many dollars are in the economy right now, those dollars are in high demand all around the world to buy Treasury debt (one of the biggest safe havens in the global market right now, so much so that buying T-debt is considered ""saving""). This is why the yields on Treasury bonds and notes are at historic lows; it's bad everywhere, and U.S. Government debt is one of the surest things in the world market, especially now that Euro-bonds have become suspect. Currency Devaluation - This is basically specialized inflation; when there are more dollars in the market than people want to have in order to use to buy our goods and services, demand for our currency (the medium of trade for our goods and services) drops, and it takes fewer Euros, Yen or Yuan to buy a dollar. This can happen even if demand for our dollars inside our own borders is high, and is generally a function of our trade situation; if we're buying more from other countries than they are from us, then our dollars are flooding the currency exchange markets and thus become cheaper because they're easy to get. Again, there are other variables at play here that keep our currency strong. First off, again, it's bad everywhere; nobody's buying anything from anyone (relatively speaking) and so the relative trade deficits aren't moving much. In addition, devaluation without inflation is self-stablizing; if currency devalues but inflation is low, the cheaper currency makes the things that currency can buy cheaper, which encourages people to buy them. At the same time, the more expensive foreign currency increases the cost in dollars of foreign-made goods. All of this can be beneficial from a money policy standpoint; devaluation makes American goods cheaper to Americans and to foreign consumers alike than foreign goods, and so a policy that puts downward pressure on the dollar but doesn't make inflation a risk can help American manufacturing and other producer businesses. China knows this just as well as we do, and for decades has been artificially fixing the exchange rate of the Renmin B (Yuan) lower than its true value against the dollar, meaning that no matter how cheap American goods get on the world market, Chinese goods are still cheaper, because by definition the Yuan has greater purchasing power for the same cost in dollars. In addition, dollars aren't only used to buy American-made goods and services. The U.S. has positioned its currency over the years to be an international medium of trade for several key commodities (like oil), and the primary currency for global lenders like the IMF and the World Bank. That means that dollars become necessary to buy these things, and are received from and must be repaid to these institutions, and thus the dollar has a built-in demand pretty much regardless of our trade deficits.  On top of all that, a lot of countries base their own currencies on our dollar, by basically buying dollars (using other valuable media like gold or oil) and then holding that cash in their own central banks as the store of value backing their own paper money. This is called a ""dollar board"". Their money becomes worth a particular fraction of a dollar by definition, and that relationship is very precisely controllable; with 10 billion dollars in the vault, and 20 billion Kabukis issued from Kabukistan's central bank, a Kabuki is worth $.50. Print an additional 20 billion Kabuki and the value of one Kabuki decreases to $.25; buy an additional 10 billion dollars and the Kabuki's value increases again to $.50. Quite a few countries do this, mostly in South America, again creating a built-in demand for U.S. dollars and also tying the U.S. dollar to the value of the exports of that country. If Kabukistan's goods become highly demanded by Europe, and its currency increases relative to the dollar, then the U.S. dollar gets a boost because by definition it is worth an exact, fixed number of Kabukis (and also because a country with a dollar board typically has no problem accepting dollars as payment and then printing Kabukis to maintain the exchange rate)" The exchange rate between two currencies is simply the price that the most recent market participants were able to agree on, when trading. ie: if the USDCAD is 1.36, it's because the last trade that happened where someone bought 1 USD cost 1.36 CAD. There is no one person/organization which 'decides' the rate between two currencies. The rate moves you see is just the reality of money changing hands as people in various situations trade currencies for various reasons. Just like with stocks or any other market product, foreign exchange rates can fluctuate wildly based on many things. It is very difficult to forecast where rates will go, because the biggest changes in rates can often be unpredictable news events. For example, when Brexit happened, the value of the GBP plummeted relative to other currencies, because the market traders had less faith in the UK economy, and therefore weren't willing to pay as much to buy GBP. See more here: https://money.stackexchange.com/a/76482/44232. There is a very high level of risk in the foreign exchange market; for your sake, don't get involved in any trading that you do not well understand, first. Well, kind of XD. I usually just look through Business Week for the ADRs that are on the OTC market. I don't do anything major, but why I love them is that they have a greater reach than just ADRs on the NYSE or NASDAQ. Like for instance, if I wanted to own Thai or European stocks, many of the larger, more reputable firms are listed on the OTC market. Having said that, most other sites don't have earnings reports laid out for you. Business Week does. The only fancy thing I am interested in are options and options on futures, and Bar Chart is good for the latter. "why do markets sometimes appear in sync, but during other times, not so much By ""markets"" I'm assuming you mean equity indices such as the HSI. Financial products fluctuate with respect to the supply/demand of the traders. There's been a large increase in the number of hedge funds, prop desks who trade relative values between financial products, that partially explains why these products seem to pick up ""sync"" when they get out of line for a while." 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. I work on a buy-side firm, so I know how these small data issues can drive us crazy. Hope my answer below can help you:  Reason for price difference: 1. Vendor and data source Basically, data providers such as Google and Yahoo redistribute EOD data by aggregating data from their vendors. Although the raw data is taken from the same exchanges, different vendors tend to collect them through different trading platforms. For example, Yahoo, is getting stock data from Hemscott (which was acquired by Morningstar), which is not the most accurate source of EOD stocks. Google gets data from Deutsche Börse.  To make the process more complicated, each vendor can choose to get EOD data from another EOD data provider or the exchange itself, or they can produce their own open, high, low, close and volume from the actual trade tick-data, and these data may come from any exchanges.  2. Price Adjustment  For equities data, the re-distributor usually adjusts the raw data by applying certain customized procedures. This includes adjustment for corporate actions, such as dividends and splits. For futures data, rolling is required, and back-ward and for-warding rolling can be chosen. Different adjustment methods can lead to different price display.  3. Extended trading hours  Along with the growth of electronic trading, many market tends to trade during extended hours, such as pre-open and post-close trading periods. Futures and FX markets even trade around the clock. This leads to another freedom in price reporting: whether to include the price movement during the extended trading hours.   Conclusion To cross-verify the true price, we should always check the price from the Exchange where the asset is actually traded. Given the convenience of getting EOD data nowadays, this task should be easy to achieve.  In fact, for professional traders and investors alike, they will never reply price on free providers such as Yahoo and Google, they will most likely choose Bloomberg, Reuters, etc. However, for personal use, Yahoo and Google should both be good choices, and the difference is small enough to ignore.