Soon we will have more tranperancy“The Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday said it would no longer require hedge funds and other institutional investors to provide short-sale position data to the agency regularly, and that the ban on "naked" shorting would be made permanent.
"Naked" short selling happens when an investor sells shares short without first having borrowed them. The regulator also said it was taking other steps to increase the public availability of information related to short sales, including an effort that would make public short-sale volume and transaction data. "These actions should provide a wealth of information to the commission, other regulators, investors, analysts, academics and the media," the SEC said in a statement.
The regulator introduced a rule last year to limit "naked" shorting by requiring broker-dealers to promptly purchase or borrow securities to deliver on a short sale. That was set to expire July 31 and the SEC said Monday it made the rule permanent.
Short sales, or bets against securities, are a common tool used by hedge funds and the proprietary trading desks of investment banks. When the stock market swooned last year in the middle of the mortgage-fueled financial crisis, the SEC temporarily banned short selling of roughly 1,000 financial-services stocks.
In October, the agency introduced an emergency measure requiring institutional investors to disclose short sale positions on a weekly, confidential basis. That provision, Rule 10a-3T, is set to expire on Aug. 1. Instead of renewing the rule, the SEC said it's working on other ways to increase public disclosure of information on short selling.
In the next few weeks, the SEC said it expects self-regulatory organizations such as stock exchanges to start publishing aggregate short-selling volume in individual equity securities daily on their Web sites.
SROs also will begin publishing one-month delayed information on their Web sites about individual short-sale transactions on all equity securities that are listed on exchanges, the regulator added."