As everyone is well aware, the SEC over the past five days has issued a flurry of press releases and emergency orders relating to short sales of public equities. These emergency orders impose new delivery requirements on both long and short sales, introduce pre-borrow requirements on short sales following certain fails to deliver, ban short sales of specified financial stocks, and impose new short sale position reporting requirements on institutional investment managers. [Read more →]

Late yesterday, the Securities and Exchange Commission (”SEC”) issued an Emergency Order adopting, effective at midnight last night, a new temporary rule, Rule 204T of Regulation SHO, that (1) prohibits clearing brokers from failing to deliver shares on both long and short sales by settlement date and (2) imposes penalties on both clearing brokers and the broker-dealers who send them trades for clearance and settlement, including market makers, when a clearing broker does not close out failures to deliver on long and short sales within the timeframes specified in Rule 204T. [Read more →]