Foreign securities are returned to trading

From November 7, part of the foreign securities blocked on non-trading accounts of the settlement depository of the SPB Exchange will again be available to brokers and their clients. The trading system will receive shares worth more than $300 million, that is, only up to 10% of assets. Therefore, bidders do not expect a strong impact of the unlock on trading activity. Access to other assets is expected only after the lifting of Western sanctions against NSD.

Starting November 7, SPB Exchange will provide brokers and their clients with the opportunity to conclude exchange transactions with a part of foreign securities, which were on the non-trading sections of SPB-Bank’s depo sub-accounts.

In the “Investment Chamber”, where the clients of “Opening Investments” were transferred, they said that they received a list of 590 ISINs (international securities codes), according to which some of the clients’ securities will be unblocked. “We will distribute unfrozen securities proportionally among all clients, rounded down to the nearest whole number. We analyze the distribution of fractional balances taking into account operational capabilities,” the company said. Securities of 550-560 issuers in the volume from 0.1% to 100% will be transferred to trading sections in Freedom Finance. “100% are rare papers in the amount of 6-7 pieces. In total, about 43 thousand clients will be able to conclude transactions with a part of foreign securities,” the company explained.

Initially, the auction was scheduled to start a week ago, on October 31, but the date was postponed. According to a Kommersant source in the stock market, the Central Bank and professional participants could not come to a common position on the distribution of securities. In particular, the regulator insisted that the distribution should not infringe on the rights of clients with small portfolios, which, as part of the proportional distribution, could not receive paper, the source of Kommersant explains. At the beginning of last week, a meeting of the Central Bank with the St. Petersburg Exchange and professional participants was held, at which it was announced that the decision on the distribution of part of the unblocked securities and the start of trading had been made. The exchange declined to comment.

Ingosstrakh Investments expects that in general the share of unlocked assets will be small (up to 10%), although it will vary greatly from issuer to issuer. “Currently, most investors on the SPB Exchange can only sell assets, as they are unqualified (see “Kommersant” dated September 7.— “b”). Therefore, history will not significantly affect the volume of trading,” they say.

The main risk, according to IC Ivolga Capital, is the possible desire of some participants to sell the unlocked securities, since they could previously evaluate them as lost for themselves. Trading volumes on the exchange in October have already fallen to the values ​​of three years ago (see Kommersant-Online of November 3). At the same time, the effect is unlikely to be critical due to the fact that unlocking will be carried out proportionally for brokers and clients, which means that there will be no volume concentration for individual brokers, market participants predict.

Full unblocking of assets is possible only after the lifting of sanctions against NSD. “In the future, we see the possibility of exchanging the blocked assets of Russian residents for the blocked assets of non-residents in Russia,” Ingosstrakh Investments says, but they believe that this option is unlikely to be implemented quickly. In such conditions, the managing director of Ivolga Capital, Dmitry Alexandrov, expects “the transfer of trading in foreign assets to friendly jurisdictions” (see “Kommersant” dated October 24). Some brokers, he explains, already provide similar services for their clients.

Ksenia Kulikova, Vitaly Gaidaev