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Weekly Promotional Intelligence

The Paper Cheque: What It Means When The Promoter Takes Stock Instead Of Cash

Two weeks ago this letter measured what attention costs. The median awareness campaign came in around $125,000, the median market making retainer at $6,000 a month, and the spread between the two was the point. Liquidity is priced like a utility. Attention is priced like a negotiation.

This week the question is narrower and, it turns out, sharper. Not what attention costs. What it is paid in.

Every agreement resolves into one of a small number of arrangements. The firm takes cash. The firm takes cash plus securities. The firm already owns securities before it starts. Or, and this is the largest category by a distance, the filing does not say. The record below covers 446 disclosed engagements across 368 alerts, from 1 January to 7 August 2026.

The Headline Number Is A Silence

Three quarters of the record is silent. Those filings will give you a dollar figure, frequently a term length, often a payment schedule down to the fortnight, and then stop. That silence is not evasion. There is no general requirement to characterise a fee as cash or stock, and most filings simply state the number and move on. But it means the single field that tells you whether the firm you are reading about is a supplier or a shareholder is absent from three out of every four disclosures. Which makes the quarter that do speak worth reading carefully.

One Rule Holds Without Exception

Split the record by what was actually bought and something unusual appears. Not a tendency. A clean line.

Not one market making engagement in the record involves securities. Every disclosure that addresses the question at all says the same thing, in near identical wording. No shares, no options, no performance factors.

This letter has argued before that market making behaves like a commodity. Two firms run three quarters of the disclosures, and the middle half of the fee book sits in a band barely 1.4 times wide. The compensation form completes that picture. It is not merely priced like a utility. It is paid like one. A market maker takes a monthly cheque, does a defined job, and holds no stake in the outcome. That recurring no performance factors language is doing real work. It is the firm stating that it does not earn more if the stock goes up.

The Twenty Four

Seventeen distinct firms account for the 24 equity engagements. Four appear more than once: Capital Analytica with four, Outside The Box Capital with three, Investor Insights Systems with two, Machai Capital with two. The grants themselves are structured, not casual. North Star Investor Relations at C$8,000 a month plus 250,000 options, to be granted in January 2027 at a price set on the grant date, vesting quarterly over a year. Darrow Associates at US$10,000 a month plus 250,000 options exercisable at C$0.25 for 18 months. Kin Communications at CDN$15,000 a month plus 500,000 options at C$0.24 on a post consolidation basis. The Howard Group at CAD$12,000 a month plus 400,000 options at $0.61.

That distinction matters more than it first appears. A firm working for stock in place of payment is taking risk. A firm collecting a market rate monthly retainer and an option package on top is doing something else. It is being paid in full to do the work, and separately handed a claim on the outcome of the work it is doing.

Four Positions, Ranked By What They Tell You

One. Explicit cash. 83 engagements. The firm is a supplier. Its economics are settled the day the invoice clears, and nothing that happens to the share price afterwards changes what it earned. Every market maker in the record that discloses at all sits here.

Two. Silent. 339 engagements. You do not know, and you should not assume. A silent filing is not a cash filing. It is an unanswered question, and it is the majority of what you will read.

Three. Cash plus a grant. 24 engagements. The firm is a supplier that has also been given a position, with a strike price and a vesting schedule that are both disclosed. Read those two numbers together. The strike tells you the level at which the grant becomes worth something. The vesting schedule tells you the earliest date the firm can begin realising it. Both are in the filing, and neither requires any judgement about the company.

Four. The firm already holds. Four engagements, the rarest category in the file and the one carrying the most information per word. Here the provider or its principal discloses an existing shareholding, sometimes noting it may acquire more. That is a different relationship from any of the above. The position preceded the mandate.

For balance, 81 engagements go out of their way to state the opposite, that the firm holds no direct or indirect interest in the issuer's securities. Firms and issuers are clearly aware this is a question worth answering. Most simply do not answer it.

The Honest Counterweight

We would rather publish the number that cuts against us than have a reader find it. The 24 is a floor, not a count of what exists. Because three quarters of filings are silent, some unknown share of that 339 involves securities and simply does not say so. The true figure is 24 or higher, and we have no way to bound it from the file alone.

The zero on the market making side is firmer, because market making disclosures are unusually standardised and the ones that speak nearly all use the same explicit formula. But 69 of those 93 are silent too. What we can say is that no market making engagement discloses securities, not that none involves them.

One more. Where a single alert covers several firms, each firm is counted separately, and compensation was read from that firm's own disclosed terms rather than from the surrounding narrative. Bundled mandates that pair a market maker with investor relations work were classified by the terms attached to each firm, not by the headline on the filing.

Why The Form Beats The Figure

The size of a cheque tells you about management's intent. The form of it tells you about the recipient's. A firm paid in cash holds a receivable, and its interest in the engagement ends when it is paid. A firm holding options holds a receivable and a position, and positions have exit dates. A vesting schedule is, read plainly, a published calendar of when a service provider first becomes able to sell. A strike price is a published statement of the level at which it becomes worth doing so.

None of that is an accusation and none of it predicts behaviour. Option grants to investor relations firms are ordinary, disclosed, approved by the exchange, and frequently defended on the reasonable ground that they align a provider with the shareholders it is communicating to. That argument has real force, and 24 out of 446 is not a pattern suggesting the practice is either widespread or hidden. But alignment and exposure are the same fact viewed from two directions, and the filing hands you the strike and the vesting schedule for free.

How To Use This

Three questions, all answerable from the filing itself. First, does it say at all? Three quarters do not, so a filing that characterises its own compensation is already more informative than most. Second, is the grant instead of cash or on top of it? In every equity engagement in this file it was on top, and a firm genuinely working for stock alone would be a departure worth noting. Third, what are the strike and the vesting dates? They are disclosed, and they tell you the level and the earliest timing at which a provider's position becomes realisable.

And one to carry forward. If a firm that took options on one mandate takes cash on the next, or the reverse, that change is visible in the record. We will keep counting.

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All data sourced from SEC, TSXV and CSE public filings, covering 446 disclosed engagements across 368 alerts dated 1 January to 7 August 2026. Compensation form was classified from the disclosed terms of each individual engagement; filings stating a fee without characterising its form are counted as silent rather than as cash. Firms are named because their engagements are matters of public disclosure. Naming a firm implies no wrongdoing, and option compensation to investor relations providers is a lawful and routinely disclosed practice. Nothing here assesses the merits of any issuer or the quality of any firm's work. For informational purposes only. Not investment advice.