The European Commission adopted on Tuesday 15 December a delegated act proposing to modify the thresholds for the weekly reporting of positions for trading platforms.
The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID II) requires trading platforms to publish a weekly report showing the aggregate positions held by different categories of persons in a commodity derivative, an emission allowance or an emission allowance derivative, if the number of position holders and the volume of the open position in the instrument exceeds a minimum threshold.
Nevertheless, the Commission notes, on the basis of an opinion of the European Securities and Markets Authority, that since the entry into force of the MiFID II Directive, the thresholds relating to the volume of open positions do not seem to have fully achieved the objective of market transparency for stakeholders.
Thus, in order to provide the necessary transparency on a wider range of commodity derivatives, the Commission proposes that the minimum threshold should no longer be a relative threshold, but should be reduced to 10,000 lots.
Furthermore, in order to reduce the risk of breaching the confidentiality of information relating to position holders, for contracts where a category of person would include fewer than five active position holders, it proposes that the published weekly position report should not contain any information on that category of person.
See the delegated regulation: https://bit.ly/2Kzmclp (Original version in French by Marion Fontana)