Three weeks today, anyone trading “derivatives” in the EU is required to start reporting them on a daily basis to one of the six approved Trade Repositories.

Despite the regulatory standards being available for over a year, and despite many questions and answers between the industry, ESMA, the European Parliament and the Trade Repositories, there is still a great deal of confusion about what needs to be reported, and how, in 21 days’ time.

For those in the commodity trading industry, these rules, designed for the financial markets, are even more difficult to fathom. And answers from the “powers that be” are still not forthcoming. Never the less meeting the deadline is required.

Key matters that are unclear include:

• Which trades are actually in EMIR and defined as a “derivative” under MIFID Annex C (and therefore in EMIR).
• Which data is actually required for certain trade types. In particular, (but not limited to) physical commodity trades.
• Which trades must be backloaded, and by when.
• How delegated reporting really works.
• What to do with Exchange Traded Derivatives (only recently and briefly explained by ESMA).
• How reconciliation will work between TRs and what the consequences are.
• Handing of Unique Trade Identifiers.
• Whether the use of LEIs (or their predecessors) for counterparties is mandatory.

On top of this, each repository is handling things differently, sometimes slightly and sometimes significantly. In some cases, the advice they give contradicts, which means that one could be wrong.

For example, delegation works differently across the TRs. The advice about Exchange Traded Derivatives differs. Only some TRs are accepting “Interim UTIs”.

As we countdown, we will examine each of these issues and others as they arise. Except the volume of “news” to increase over the next 3 weeks. And do not expect activity to reach a stable plateau until several weeks after GLERT Day.