SunGard Claims Short Selling Protection

SunGard's Protegent suite of compliance solutions supports financial services firms' efforts in managing the temporary, emergency short-selling ban enacted by the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) on the shares of more than 800 financial companies. Current Protegent customers are already equipped to rapidly comply with the order and closely monitor short selling trends of employees.

The latest release of Protegent PTA, an employee trading and code of ethics compliance solution, provides rule logic to help firms monitor and prevent short selling of securities of the publicly-traded financial services firms on the SEC's list. Protegent PTA's new "Restricted List by Activity Type" rule logic, as well as its existing short selling rule, helps firms to prevent the short selling of these securities. SunGard is providing a restricted list of the included financial firms to customers of the latest version of Protegent PTA that can easily be uploaded into the application, as well as issuing step-by-step documentation on how to configure, test, and implement the rule.

Protegent Trading Compliance, a compliance lifecycle and business management solution for institutional equities trading businesses, provides firms the ability to monitor all sell short customer orders for securities located on the threshold list. This information is archived, maintained for three years, and readily accessible within Protegent Trading Compliance. With this information readily available in one system, firms can perform their due diligence, research and surveillance on any short sale transaction in any security on a threshold list. Protegent Trading Compliance also provides the tools to monitor, research, and react to regulatory inquiries in a timely fashion.

SunGard's Protegent Surveillance, a software application for brokerage compliance, is able to highlight the potentially unsuitable activity associated with short selling and naked short selling, through its T + 1 alerting feature. As a rules-based compliance solution, Protegent Surveillance helps mitigate internal and regulatory risk by identifying questionable transactions and positions, improving field supervision processes and audits and analyzing client and account activity against firm defined mandates.

"Financial services firms consistently rely on SunGard to help them quickly adapt to volatile market conditions and corresponding regulatory changes," said Raj Mahajan, president of SunGard's Trading business. "Our customers can continue to depend on our ability to respond proactively to these changes to help them to maintain compliance and protect the interests of their firms and clients."

SEC Bans Financial Firm Short Selling

A temporary ban on short-selling of 799 US financial firms has been imposed by The Securities and Exchange Commission, in a move that followed that by the UK's Financial Services Authority. Further companies might be bought into the net.

The S.E.C. said the “temporary emergency action” would “protect the integrity and quality of the securities market and strengthen investor confidence.”

“The commission is committed to using every weapon in its arsenal to combat market manipulation that threatens investors and capital markets,” the S.E.C.’s chairman, Christopher Cox, said. He continued “The emergency order temporarily banning short selling of financial stocks will restore equilibrium to markets.”

A similar ban in London was seen as a catalyst for the massive 8.84% surge in the FTSE 100. However, it should be remembered that the US has had previous bans on short-sellling plus a long-standing rule that says short-selling take place on an uptick.