Goldman Sachs fined $3 million by FINRA over mismarking short sale orders

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, Wall Street’s self-funded watchdog, fined Goldman Sachs Inc $3 million on Tuesday for mistakenly marking some of its stock orders as “long” instead of “short”, and for trade reporting violations.

From October 2015 to April 2018, Goldman mismarked around 60 million short sale orders totaling more than 14 billion shares as “long” sales, with nearly eight million of those orders, totaling more than a billion shares, being executed, FINRA said.

The mismarked orders were caused by the failure to add a single line of computer code during an upgrade to automated trading software Goldman used to simplify its order flow, FINRA said.

Because they were inaccurately marked as “long,” 12,335 of the executed orders were executed at or below the best displayed price available while a short sale circuit breaker was in effect, FINRA said. Short sale circuit breakers prohibit the execution or display of a short sale in that security at a price that is less than or equal to the current national best bid.

The orders, which represented less than 1% of Goldman’s total principle sell orders during the period, were auto-generated to hedge Goldman’s Synthetic Product Group’s synthetic risk exposure resulting from its execution of equity swap transactions with clients, FINRA said.

The mismarked orders also caused Goldman to submit inaccurate trade reports to FINRA and maintain inaccurate books and records, the regulator said.

Goldman also failed to establish and maintain a supervisory system reasonably designed to achieve compliance with short sale regulations SHO and rules relating to accurate trade reporting, FINRA said.

Goldman accepted and consented to FINRA’s findings without admitting to or denying them.

(Reporting by John McCrank; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama)