Bloomberg – The Financial Services Authority, the U.K.’s markets regulator, said it won’t require hedge funds to disclose their holdings in London’s commodity markets.
The FSA said in June that it may publish reports like those from the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The CFTC’s weekly Commitment of Traders report shows how much trading is being done by speculators and users of commodities and whether they are betting prices will go up or down.
“We spoke to market participants across the board from investment banks such as Morgan Stanley and Barclays Capital to brokers and metals traders and they said there’s no demand for it,’ FSA spokeswoman Teresa La Thangue said in a telephone interview from London today. It would be ‘costly’ for the FSA to publish the reports, she said.
The organization said in March that it planned to pay more attention to commodity markets, which have attracted less regulatory oversight than stock and bonds. An increase in money invested in commodity markets has raised the risk of market abuse and failure, it said.
“In the U.S. markets, there’s a good level of transparency and reporting, which we don’t have in London,’ said Robin Bhar, a London-based commodities analyst at UBS AG. “Transparency is definitely needed in the London markets. The majority of users would benefit’ from a CFTC-style report, he said.
