Tausi Insider

Over the past few years, a number of organizations have taken aim at several aspects of how Canada regulates short selling. Frank Gunn/The Canadian Press Canada’s securities regulators are considering whether the identity of short sellers, as well as the details of their trades, should be publicly disclosed when they take a significant position in a Canadian company. A coalition of Canadian regulators issued a notice Thursday asking market participants if they would support stricter transparency rules being imposed on short sellers, including disclosing their names and trading positions to the public whenever they make a significant short sale. The notice is part of a broader review of short selling – one of the most polarizing issues in the capital markets – by the Canadian Securities Administrators, the umbrella group for the country’s provincial and territorial securities commissions, and the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC). Short selling is a bet tha...

Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX, speaks via a video feed from the Bahamas to The New York Times DealBook conference in New York on Nov. 30. HIROKO MASUIKE /The New York Times News Service Canadian watchdogs responsible for investor protection are banding together to enhance their regulation of the crypto sector, using unusually sharp language to threaten legal action against companies that remain resistant to outside oversight and warning trading platforms to stay away from one of the sector’s most nebulous assets. Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA), a collection of provincial and territorial securities regulators, has pursued oversight of the crypto sector for close to two years, but the process of registering crypto trading companies is a complex task. It is also time consuming, considering that hundreds of trading platforms were already up and running by the time the watchdogs released formal regulations in March, 2021. Since the rules came out, many crypt...

Large banks and insurers have once again jointly obtained a court order that permits them to hold either online-only or hybrid annual general meetings. Jenny Kane/The Associated Press Financial institutions: Do right by your shareholders and meet them face-to-face next year. Large banks and insurers have once again jointly obtained a court order that permits them to hold either online-only or hybrid annual general meetings (a format that allows investors to attend virtually or in the flesh) because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It may sound inconsequential, but it’s not. The 2023 AGM season will mark the fourth straight year that some of Canada’s largest companies will have legal cover to forgo in-person gatherings entirely even though electronic-only meetings erode shareholders’ rights. Yes, coronavirus is still with us. But given that many of these same corporations are urging their employees to return to the office, it’s starting feel like one of the lingering effects of the pandemic ...

Coinbase was founded more than a decade ago in San Francisco. DADO RUVIC/Reuters Crypto firm Coinbase Global Inc. COIN-Q is expanding its Canadian operations even as cryptocurrencies have sunk to near multiyear lows and the nascent sector faces broad-based volatility. Lucas Matheson has been hired as the new head of Canada for Coinbase, the company told Tausi Insider. He most recently worked as a senior director at Shopify Inc. and previously held other leadership roles at Deloitte and Toronto-Dominion Bank. Coinbase was founded more than a decade ago in San Francisco. It is publicly listed on Nasdaq and is widely considered the largest crypto exchange in the United States for its trading volume of digital assets. Two years ago, when its shares were soaring, Coinbase shut down its California headquarters and switched to a remote-work model. Since then, crypto as a whole has been marred by scandals that have led to high-profile bankruptcies and collapses of key industry players, such ...

An Ontario judge has denied a class-action lawsuit against seven Canadian discount brokerages that alleged investors had improperly been overcharged billions of dollars in fees for a service they did not receive. Ontario Superior Court Justice Edward Belobaba dismissed an application to certify a class-action lawsuit that was filed against online trading divisions of four major Canadian banks as well as those run by HSBC Securities (Canada) Inc., Credential Qtrade Securities Inc. and Desjardins Securities Inc. The proposed class action estimated that since 1993, discount brokers – including BMO InvestorLine Inc., Scotia Capital Inc., CIBC Investor Services Inc. and TD Waterhouse Canada Inc. – have improperly collected about $5-billion in “trailing commissions,” which are fees for providing investors advice, a service discount brokers are not legally allowed to provide. Paul Bates, co-counsel for the plaintiff, which includes a group of do-it-yourself investors who had trading account...