Canadian brokers pay US$1M to settle SEC charges
THE CANADIAN PRESS, 23 December 2020
TORONTO — The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission says Canadian broker-dealers Cormark Securities Inc. and ITG Canada Corp. have agreed to pay a total of US$1 million to settle charges of improper trading procedures. According to the regulator, the two firms provided incorrect order-marking information in a period from August 2016 through October 2017 that caused more than 200 sale orders from a single hedge fund, representing total sales of more than US$660 million, to be mismarked as “long” in violation of SEC regulations.
By definition, “long” means the seller actually owns the stock they are selling, as opposed to a “short” if the seller is borrowing stock to sell. The SEC says that because the hedge fund’s sale orders were, in fact, short sales, the incorrect order-marking caused the executing broker to violate regulations by failing to borrow or locate the shares prior to effecting those short sales.
