OTC Equity Options' Dynamics

External question — Quantitative Finance Stack Exchange Author: user3232 Original post: https://quant.stackexchange.com/questions/7296 License: CC BY-SA 3.0 — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Adaptation: HTML converted to plain text; contact email addresses removed. This only applies to options that do not have marketable equivalents since margin can be marked to them. I've never been able to find this on my goog. How is margin typically calculated for OTC equity options? I guess mostly, in the contract, how is IV determined? Also, are the OTC equity option markets liquid enough to provide "constant" bids and asks for "standardized" (whatever that is) contracts? Does the same go for cash-settled options? Are cash-settled options as liquid as their deliverable counterparts? Addition Are the platforms (if they even exist) as well structured as your common broker java platform, or is everything ad hoc, bulletin board, over the phone?