COVID-19 Implications on Short-Selling Restrictions

Since March, financial market participants have witnessed a storm of extreme volatility that has forced regulatory bodies to bring significant changes to the short-selling rules across global equity markets. While a majority of the jurisdictions in the European Union have decided to reduce the threshold from 0.2% to 0.1%, jurisdictions hit hard with the current pandemic like France, Belgium, Italy, Spain and Austria have decided to ban short selling for a brief period of one month. In Asia and the Middle East, jurisdictions like South Korea and the UAE have also decided to ban short selling in an effort to combat the virus’ negative impact. Jurisdictions across other continents in less threatening situations have explicitly highlighted that they are keeping a close watch on the current status of the pandemic and would not shy away from taking requisite actions in order to maintain sanity in the financial system.

IVP’s regulatory reporting platform, IVP REGULATORY REPORTING (RAPTOR), assists buy-side managers across the globe in servicing regulatory mandates in over 50 jurisdictions. The solution’s transaction filings module comes equipped with a configurable rules set-up toolkit to help buy-side managers swiftly incorporate and monitor regulatory changes. IVP also offers a premium white glove managed services model that removes the burden away from clients of monitoring exceptions and helps streamline the process of filing transaction-driven mandates, both on short selling and substantial shareholding, across the globe.