What happened to UK short disclosures in 2026

On Friday 11 July 2026, the UK's public register of named short positions stopped updating. From Monday 13 July, the FCA instead publishes one anonymous aggregate per company per day. This is the biggest change to UK short selling transparency since disclosure began under the EU regime in 2012, and this site preserved the old register's final state before it disappeared.

What the old register showed

For nearly fourteen years, any investor holding a net short position of0.5% or more of a UK company's issued share capital was publicly named. The FCA's daily spreadsheet listed the fund, the company, the exact percentage and the position date, and kept every historical disclosure back to31 Oct 2012.

On its final full day (10 Jul 2026), the register named99 investment firms holding601 disclosable positions across 214 companies. The full history ran to 108,850 disclosure rows. Journalists used it to report who was shorting a troubled retailer; companies used it to know which funds were positioned against them; researchers used it to study how short sellers behave.

What replaced it

The Short Selling Regulations 2025 (implemented by the FCA's PS26/5) rebuilt UK disclosure around anonymity, with three moving parts from 13 July 2026:

• Private notification at 0.2%. Position holders still report to the FCA at 0.2% of issued share capital and every 0.1% band thereafter, a lower bar than before.
• Public aggregate only. Each working day the FCA publishes the aggregate net short position (ANSP) per company: the sum of all notified positions, with no names attached.
• A defined scope. The Reportable Shares List names every company in scope (~1,400 at go-live), replacing the old exempted-shares approach.

What was gained and lost

Gained: the aggregate captures positions between 0.2% and 0.5% that were previously invisible in public data, so the per-company total is more complete. Regulators argued anonymity also removes a deterrent: some managers avoided crossing 0.5% purely to stay out of the newspapers, muting the usefulness of the old data.

Lost: accountability and texture. "Who is short?" is no longer answerable in the UK. One fund at 3% and six funds at 0.5% now print the same number, and the behaviour of individual managers can no longer be tracked. The era of headlines naming specific hedge funds against specific companies ended on 11 July 2026.

The archive

Because the register was replaced in place, its contents were at risk of simply vanishing. We downloaded and froze the final files, the named era's complete public record, and keep them versioned alongside our daily ANSP archive. The methodology page describes both datasets; today's data lives on the most shorted league table.