The final draft of the MiFID II/MiFIR Regulatory Technical Standard(RTS) was published on September 28th. Key sections for the commodity and energy trading sector include the section on the ancillary exemption and position limits. In the last few days some new comments have been published:

This article on the Reuters website reports comments made by Trafigura that they will need to reconsider where some hedge trades are cleared. The article looks at the impact of  the proposed position limit rules and refers to the fact that in some cases hedges will contribute to the limit (exemptions will be available to non financial counterparties in some cases, but a loss of exemption under the ancillary activity rules could turn a company into a financial counterparty, removing the exemption).

There has also been push back on the inclusion of “trading for compliance reasons” as part of the exemption calculation as outlined in this article on the Carbon Pulse web site. Despite an earlier analysis that the 20% market size threshold will allow many firms to keep their exemptions, some industry bodies feel that the inclusion of trading for compliance reasons will lead to some unwanted exemption loss.

More discussion is likely to surface over the next few weeks.