0.1% shorting notification adopted by FCA – mirrors EU

This blog gives you the latest topical news plus some informal comments on them from ShareSoc’s directors and other contributors. These are the personal comments of the authors and not necessarily the considered views of ShareSoc. The writers may hold shares in the companies mentioned. You can add your own comments on the blog posts, but note that ShareSoc reserves the right to remove or edit comments where they are inappropriate or defamatory.

On 6 January 2021, the Treasury published the Short Selling (Notification Thresholds) Regulations 2021 No. 5  to amend the notification threshold under Article 5(2) of the Short Selling Regulation from 0.2% to 0.1% of the issued share capital of an issuer. This change will come into force on 1 February 2021.

This means that from 1 February 2021 the notification threshold for issued share capital of a company that has shares admitted to trading on a UK trading venue (UK Regulated Market and UK MTF) will be 0.1%.

The EU (ESMA) made this decision in March 2020.

The FCA publishes short positions daily – See the public short positions disclosed to us – daily update (XLSX).

I find this very useful as a short position is often a red flag and a good idea to sell. I learnt this lesson the hard way when I held IQE and it was 12% shorted and I did not sell. I held on and eventually sold at 57p, and after I did so I found I was able to sleep more comfortably as I watched IQE decline further, although it has now gone up to 74p and is now 1.77% so I am happy not to be invested.

I noted the following short positions;

Sainsbury 9.4%

Morrisons 3.38%

Hargreaves Lansdown 2.56%

St James Place 1.39%

AJ Bell .72%

Saga .59%

Cliff Weight, Director, ShareSoc

DISCLOSURE: I hold shares in Saga, but none of the others mentioned in this blog.

3 Comments
  1. Mark Bentley says:

    This website is also useful for tracking short interests and changes thereto: https://shorttracker.co.uk/

  2. Mark Guthrie says:

    What is the position date. I see some at 2014. Surely they have to close the position at some stage?

  3. George Faulkner says:

    “Short Tracker” gets the shorting level info from the FCA database. I thought, though, that notification to the FCA database was when shorting level for a hedge fund exceeded 0.5%?

    quote from the short tracker website
    “When a fund manager discloses a position of less than 0.5% in a company, we now remove them from the current disclosures section and from the total short position”

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