Following Monday’s steep sell-off on China’s stock market, securities regulators are hoping to avoid another punishing decline and are having second thoughts about re-instituting a rule that would allow major shareholders to sell stocks on the secondary market.
On Monday, the CSI 300 Index fell 7% triggering a circuit breaker that shut down the market for the rest of day. The plunge was partly blamed on the ending this Friday of a six-month ban on share sales by major shareholders and senior executives. The ban had been imposed by the watchdog of the nation’s equity market, the China Securities Regulatory Commission (CSRC), on July 8 to help stabilize China’s equity markets during the summer crash.
Investors fear lifting the ban will bring a barrage of selling by major stakeholders.
Hoping to avoid another big sell-off, and triggering of the market’s circuit breakers, the CSRC said on its official website that it is studying rules “to regulate share sales by major shareholders and senior executives in listed companies.”
“The CSRC is studying issuing pre-announcement rules for the major sales of shares during the pre-opening sessions by the above group, and restricting the proportion of shares that they could sell during a given period of time, ” it said.
“It seems the CSRC is likely to extend the ban, or introduce other mechanisms to reduce a big sell-off by major shareholders, particularly under the current situation when markets are so volatile,” an unnamed senior analyst with a Shanghai based state-owned brokerage told the South China Morning Post.