China's three major exchanges: Stop disclosing daily foreign capital flows on August 19

Starting from August 19, the three major exchanges in Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hong Kong announced that they would no longer disclose the buying and selling transaction volume of foreign funds. This means that investors can only see the total transaction amount, including the total transaction amount of individual stocks on the day, the total number of transactions, the total transaction amount of ETFs, and the list of the top ten active securities and their total transaction amount.

This change means that investors will no longer be able to obtain the total amount of foreign capital on the day, as well as the net buying and selling data of the top ten active stocks. In addition, the total holdings of foreign funds for a single stock, which were originally updated daily, are now published once a quarter.

Although after the implementation of the new system, investors can still understand the flow of funds to the Chinese stock market through the quarterly report on financial assets held by overseas entities issued by the central bank, these data will lag by at least one month, and sometimes there will be some inexplicable delays.

In fact, as early as mid-May this year, the three major exchanges had stopped disclosing real-time data on foreign stock market transactions. At that time, they stated that during trading hours, the market would no longer provide real-time data on the buying, selling and total transaction volume of foreign investors in the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock markets. The real-time short-selling balance will only be displayed when the stock price falls below 300,000 shares; the real-time quota balance will only be displayed when the daily quota balance is less than 30%, and the status will be displayed as "available" at other times.

The official explained at the time that this was done to unify investors' investment behavior and ensure that everyone can "fairly obtain market information"

However, Stevan Tam, research director of Fulbright Securities in Hong Kong, expressed concerns about this. He believed that reducing data disclosure in the public market would reduce market transparency, which is not good for Chinese and foreign investors.