FINRA Regulatory Notice 21-19: New Short Sale Reporting Regime

Hi everyone,

My apologies for not being more active the last two weeks or so - life has a tendency to get in the way. But part of that involves something that I’m very excited to announce on here, hopefully in another week or two.

Today I want to call your attention to FINRA’s most regulatory notice - 21-19.

This is clearly in response to the volatility involving GME and AMC, amongst others. FINRA is proposing some very significant changes to short-sale related disclosures. This is a big set of changes, and it looks very encouraging to me. The headlines are:

• Consolidation of short interest data publication, centralized on the FINRA website

• Changes to the content of short interest data

  • Require firms to segregate short interest held in proprietary accounts vs that held in customer accounts.

  • Report to FINRA account-level short interest (not for publication).

  • Report synthetic short positions. Interestingly they only note options contracts, and do not include security-based swaps. They are asking for comments on this.

  • Loan obligations from arranged financing to better reflect actual short sentiment.

  • Total shares outstanding and the public float.

• FINRA is considering reducing reporting timeframe to daily or weekly, and is asking for comments on this.

• Information on allocations of FTD positions - a daily report of FTD allocations at the security level, with applicable closeout obligation. This would not be for publication, but to allow FINRA to conduct more effective investigations.

• They’re asking for comments on whether to create a reporting framework around stock lending activity.

If you visit the page I linked above, you can see the full details of the regulatory notice, and also all of FINRA’s questions for public comment.

Submitting a comment letter can be a very effective way of advocating for change and showing FINRA that there is demand for a far more rigorous disclosure regime. The best comment letters are concise, well cited with evidence to back up claims, and unemotional. I know this is a hot button topic, but my feeling is that FINRA is trying to figure out what to do here, and I would urge you to engage them in good faith.

Please let me know if you have any questions, I’ll do my best to respond to as many as I can.