The Morning Brief: NYSE Wants Hedge Funds to Reveal Short Positions

The New York Stock Exchange is lobbying for hedge funds to disclose their short positions. According to Pensions & Investments, the NYSE is asking the Securities and Exchange Commission to create a rule that would require investors to reveal which stocks they are betting against. Investors with at least $100 million in U.S. equity assets each quarter now have up to 45 days to report their U.S. long positions. However, they don’t have to reveal any of their short positions.

This is in contrast with the European Union, which requires funds to disclose to the public any short positions that account for at least 0.5 percent of a firm’s share capital. They must report positions of at least 0.2 percent to their regulator. Hedge funds are very guarded about their short positions. They consider them so proprietary they rarely even disclose them to their investors, who trust millions of dollars to them — a strange, unwritten arrangement.

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Ted Seides is not joining Credit Suisse after all. The co-founder of Protégé Partners had resigned on June 1 to join CS on October 1 to run a hedge fund. However, according to Reuters, it is not going to happen. “As we worked through the details over the last three months, we hit a snag in reconciling conflicts between my departure at Protégé and my arrival at Credit Suisse,” Seides said in an e-mail, according to the wire service. “The complexities of the transition led me to take a pause, reassess, and conclude that I wanted some more time and space before diving into my next adventure.”

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Kenneth Griffin’s Citadel disclosed it bought a 6 percent stake in First Data Corporation, the payments-processing giant that earlier this month went public in this year’s largest initial public offering.

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