Summary

Today IIROC is publishing a report on its failed trade study (“Study”). IIROC initiated the Study to examine settlement failure of trades executed on Canadian equity marketplaces. Market Regulation Inc. (RS)1 originally published a study of failed trades in 2007 that was based on a sample of failed trades provided to us by a group of dealers. Since that time, IIROC has dramatically improved our ability to conduct large-scale data analysis. We felt it time to refresh our review to ensure our understanding is current and that our regulatory and compliance framework remains effective.

Our goal was to provide high-level observations and update our understanding of this important topic. In this report we discuss:

• Prevalence of settlement failure
• How long transactions take to settle
• Relationship between settlement failure and short selling and short positions
• Outliers

The full report is available here.

• 1RS was a predecessor organization to IIROC