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.