Form 144 PEOPLES BANCORP OF NORTH CAROLINA INC For: 24 April

This item is not a market event so much as a reminder that the distribution channel itself is part of the risk stack. In practice, the biggest second-order effect is on execution quality: stale, indicative, or sponsored pricing can create false signals for discretionary traders and systematic models that ingest retail-facing feeds without venue validation. The edge here is not directional; it is avoiding being the counterparty to bad data and poor timing.

For portfolios with any exposure to crypto or thinly traded instruments, the key vulnerability is intraday gap risk around headlines that appear actionable but are not sourced to an exchange. That matters most when liquidity is already fragile: weekends, off-hours, and event windows tend to amplify the slippage between quoted and executable levels. In those periods, even a small misread can turn a neutral position into an unintended convexity event.

The contrarian takeaway is that generic risk-disclosure content often correlates with elevated retail activity or promotional traffic, which can temporarily improve attention flow to higher-beta crypto names and venues, but not necessarily fundamentals. If we see a surge in retail engagement, the cleaner trade is usually on market structure beneficiaries rather than directional coins: exchanges, market makers, and volatility sellers tend to monetize turnover while spot holders absorb the noise.