On April 1, and following a recent consultation , the European Securities Markets Authority (ESMA) published a review report on position limits under MiFID II (the Review Report) and a report on technical advice on weekly position reporting (the Technical Advice Report).

The Review Report will provide the European Commission with useful guidance for its on-going review of MiFID II in relation to the impact of position limits and position management on liquidity, market abuse and orderly pricing and settlement conditions in commodity derivatives markets, which it must deliver to the European Parliament and Council.

Under the Review Report, ESMA proposes to refocus the position limit regime on the most important commodity derivative contracts and improve the trading venues’ implementation of position management controls through Level 2 measures.

In connection with the Review Report, ESMA published on the same day the Technical Advice Report to the European Commission on the weekly aggregated information to be published by trading venues on open positions per category of stakeholders. The Technical Advice Report aims to ensure that information is made available for a larger number of commodity derivatives traded on EU trading venues to ensure more transparency in EU commodity derivative markets.

The Review Report is available here and the Technical Advice Report is available here.