Regulatory Guide 196

RG 196 is ASIC's guidance on how the short selling disclosure regime in the Corporations Act 2001 works in practice. The Act creates the obligations — the prohibition on naked short selling in section 1020B, transaction reporting under section 1020AC, and net short position reporting under section 1020AB — and the guide explains who must report, what must be counted, how it is calculated and by when it must be lodged.

Two distinct disclosures sit under the regime. The first is at the point of sale: a seller must tell its broker the order is a short sale, and the broker reports that to the ASX, producing daily gross short sale transaction data. The second is positional: a person must report their net short position in a security to ASIC when it exceeds $100,000 or 0.01% of issued capital, whichever is smaller, measured as at the close of each trading day.

The netting rule is what makes Australian figures distinctive. Long positions the reporting entity holds in the same security are offset against its short sales, so what is reported is residual directional exposure rather than gross borrowing. Aggregating those reports across all participants produces the single figure ASIC publishes per security, four trading days after the position date. Individual reporters are never identified.

The regime dates from the global financial crisis. Short selling was suspended in Australia in 2008, reinstated in stages, and the current framework of covered-only selling plus mandatory position disclosure was built around that experience. ASIC retains standing powers to intervene in the market, and the modification and relief provisions in the regime accommodate genuine hedging, market making and certain deferred settlement situations.

Everything on this site derives from the dataset RG 196 produces: aggregated, net, delayed by four trading days, and covering only positions above the reporting threshold. Understanding those four properties is what separates reading the data correctly from over-reading it — smaller positions are absent entirely, hedged exposure is netted away, and the picture is always several sessions old.