General Discussion AGY, page-20262

@GCar
The ASIC site Requirements for disclosure and reporting of short sales | ASIC has everything you could ever not want to read about short selling but I still cant get my head around it.

In regard to reporting ASIC Short position reports table | ASIC they state....
"we are unable to verify the accuracy of all individual reports submitted to ASIC, nor to verify that all short sellers in our market (both in Australia and overseas) are lodging reports."
That sounds like they really have no clue as to who is shorting or reporting at all.


This document makes it all sound so easy & should not be that onerous to either execute a short sale nor report it, I mean how hard is to just click either the short sell button or the Long sell button.
Wouldn't it also be just as easy to record any short sales with a broker code as they are executed so as to inform the market?

Requirements for disclosureand reporting of short sales

ASIC Market Advice - 7 April 2011

This is Information Sheet 95 (INFO 95).The purpose of this document is to provide information to assist brokers andtheir clients meet the short sale transaction reporting requirements.

Short sale transactionreporting

Where a person (a seller) executes a short sale and relies on anexisting securities lending arrangement to have a ‘presently exercisable andunconditional right to vest’ the products in the buyer at the time of the sale,the sale of the products is a covered short sale. Covered short selling ispermitted under the Corporations Act 2001 (Corporations Act).For a detailed overview of the short selling provisions of the CorporationsAct, please see Regulatory Guide 196 Short selling (RG 196).

Sellers and brokers who make a short sale on a licensed market may berequired to comply with the short sale transaction reporting requirements.

If a seller engages a broker to make a covered short sale on its behalf,the seller must report the particulars of the sale to the broker: s1020AB(3).

A broker must not make a short sale on a licensed market on behalf of aseller unless, before making the sale, the broker has asked the seller whetherthe requested sale is a short sale and has recorded in writing the seller’sanswer: s1020AE.

Common industry reportingpractice

Commonly, sellers and brokers who send and receive trading instructionsusing the widely used IRESS and FIX dealing systems facilitate compliance withtheir short sale transaction reporting obligations by agreeing that the sellerwill indicate to the broker, at the time of placing a sale order, whether thesale will be a short sale using specified IRESS or FIX field codes.

In this way, a seller can fulfil its obligation to give particulars of ashort sale to its broker and the broker can fulfil its obligation to makeenquiries of the seller’s sale order.

Short sale transactionreporting using IRESS field codes

A client, having confirmed their understanding of their short saletransaction reporting obligations, may agree in writing with their broker toinform the broker whether a sale order would be a short sale or a long sale bypopulating any of the IRESS fields ‘Instructions’, ‘External ID’ or‘Transaction basis’ as follows:

Table 1: Mandatory fieldsusing the IRESS systems

	Sale type	IRESS system action
1	Long sale	Click 'Long sell' button
2	Short sale	Click 'Short sell' button

Short sale transactionreporting using FIX protocol tags

A client, having confirmed their understanding of their short saletransaction reporting obligations, may agree in writing with their broker toinform the broker whether a sale order would be a short sale or a long sale bypopulating FIX protocol tag 54 as follows:

Table 2: Mandatory tag 54values using FIX compliant systems

	Sale type	FIX
1	Long sale	2
2	Short sale	5

Telephone orders

When placing sale orders over the phone, sellers may meet theirobligations and speed up the process by volunteering the type of sale orderthey are placing as follows: