Friday 1 May 2015

Bursa limits information to 5 years ONLY? (2)

MSWG comments on the same issue in their newsletter for April 30, 2015:


"On the capital market scene, recently, to our surprise, we learnt of a significant change in the provision of statistics and information pertaining to public listed companies (PLCs) on Bursa Malaysia website.

We have received complaints from retail investors and noticed that statistics and information including company announcements, quarterly financial results and annual reports were only available on the Bursa Malaysia website for 5 years. Hitherto, these information were generally made available for 10 years. We do not know why Bursa has taken this step to truncate information available to the public to only 5 years. In addition, no announcement was made on such a change.

Also, we believe this new development is somewhat regressive. It is always preferable for investors to have longer period of 10 years’ statistics including historical data and announcements at a one-stop centre to enable investors to carry out meaningful research. Particularly, if they need to do a time-series analysis which requires longer historical data.

We urge Bursa to reconsider providing these important statistics for the consumption of the general investing public who relies on reliable and up-to-date information in order to develop a more vibrant retail investors’ market."


First of all great that MSWG puts pressure on Bursa to reconsider the change.

I am also rather surprised, I would have thought that MSWG would have been kept in the loop of radical changes like this, but apparently not.

As far as I remember, Bursa started with their platform in (probably, I do remember some material from before 2000) 1999, and simply kept all announcements ever made.

In other words a great archive of all kind of information: financial results, IPO documents, shareholder changes of directors and major shareholders, related party transactions, etc.

I have been critical of Bursa on many occasions (mostly on enforcement related matters), but I have praised their website, for instance here:


"Despite having an otherwise excellent announcement website (I can't stress this enough, it is much better than all other announcements websites that I frequent), there is always room for improvement I guess."


If Bursa restricts the announcements to only the last five years, then I am afraid I have to take back my compliment.

The HKEX for instance gives information starting 1999:




SGX seems to be the worst of the three. They only offer announcements since 2010, also the user interface is confusing (their last update made things even worse), at least, that is my opinion. In addition to that, they even make  money on advertisements through Googleads, which I think they really should not do (users might mistakenly think that the companies featured in the ads are supported by SGX, which they aren't). SGX is making enough money as an exchange, they don't need this extra source of income.

4 comments:

  1. Very disappointing development. We need to keep the pressure on Bursa.
    I wonder if access to older financial information/releases is now only available as a chargeable service?

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  2. Hi Wammo, that is my guess (which I think is bad), but for the time being I am really hoping for a response from Bursa soon. Just in case it is a temporarily technical issue or so.

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  3. Just announced this on the Bursa site:
    "Bursa Malaysia had on 20 April 2015 replaced the announcement dissemination system known as Bursa LINK. As we have over 1 million records of announcements made by listed issuers over a span of 15 years, the data migration and verification has to be carried out progressively to ensure data integrity and reliability. During the initial period of migration, only announcements for a period of 5 years from 1 January 2010 are made available on the website. Thereafter, the remaining past announcements on Bursa Malaysia website will be progressively increased to 15 years within 3 months from 20 April 2015."

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  4. Thanks, that was what I was waiting for.

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