IT is encouraging to see that the Singapore Exchange (SGX) now publishes its daily Marking of Sell Orders report at the end of each trading day instead of the next day, thus addressing a key shortcoming (no pun intended) raised in this column nine months ago (BT Hock Lock Siew "Short selling data still falls short", March 14, 2014), which was that the reports were released one day late. However, even though the data is now delivered promptly to investors, more has to be done to improve its usefulness.

Before doing this though, it is important to have a clear idea of what these reports hope to achieve. If the aim is simply to give the public an idea as to which stocks were favoured among short-sellers and traders during any given day, then simply aggregating all trades marked as short as per the current practice would arguably suffice.

If however, the goal is to produce a gauge of bearish sentiment that might aid investors in their decision-making, it would then be necessary to exclude all trades which were squared off before 5 pm to arrive at the nett positions still outstanding at the end of trading.