促进加拿大所有上市公司的公平竞争环境「CSE 交易所新闻」

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加拿大资本市场最好的方面之一是我们能够为早期公司提供资金。凭借在采矿和石油和天然气勘探方面的成功融资历史，该行业近年来运用其技能支持技术和生命科学等广泛领域的创新。这导致合法大麻行业的公司最近取得了显着的成功。

加拿大在为这些快速增长的新兴行业的世界各地公司提供资金方面处于世界领先地位。最近的投资主题包括开发用于治疗迷幻化合物精神健康问题的医疗应用，以及支持加密货币和支持技术的兴起，这些技术正在推动支付领域和金融服务的提供效率。

与任何行业一样，在加拿大提供证券交易所服务的竞争使发行公司和投资者都受益。

加拿大证券交易所 (CSE) 于 18 年前成立，其使命是为公共发行人提供一个简化的、低成本的替代多伦多证券交易所和 TSX 风险交易所的替代方案。我们成功了。CSE 现在拥有 700 多个活跃的上市公司，并且在过去几年中吸引了比其历史上任何时候都更多的规模和成熟度更大的全球发行人。

更激烈的竞争，包括在 CSE 之后推出的其他新交易所，显然有利于加拿大的投资界，以及它所服务的公司和投资者。

也就是说，在向公司、经纪人和投资者提供交易服务方面，我们可以而且应该做得更好，促进竞争。以下是一些新进入者面临的挑战的示例，以及一些潜在的解决方案。

市场数据

在美国，一个行业联盟从证券交易所收集和处理实时市场信息，然后以单一费用提供对在每个交易所（纳斯达克、纽约证券交易所和纽约证券交易所）上市的所有证券的数据的访问。换句话说，无论特定证券在哪里交易，最后统计有 16 个场所，感兴趣的投资者都可以“看到”每笔交易和当前报价。

在加拿大，情况并非如此。在 TSX 和 TSX 风险交易所股票几乎一半的交易发生在不同市场的环境中，投资者被迫分别与各个场所进行交易以了解全貌。许多人要么不了解我们错综复杂的市场结构，要么不想支付这些单独的费用，他们选择仅从现有交易所获取数据。这会导致一系列问题：

当 TMX 集团交易所的交易因任何原因中断时，加拿大的流动性会急剧枯竭。在美国，当主要交易所出现技术问题时，其他市场会紧随其后。加拿大市场几乎没有应有的弹性。

由于该行业的大部分部门无法获得有意义的市场数据，而且该群体包括国家投资经销商的专业零售顾问，缺乏透明度对增强对加拿大股市运作的信心几乎没有作用。人们很自然地认为，如果他们看不到交易活动，就说明正在发生一些不健康的事情。这种缺乏透明度导致对市场运作缺乏信心。

索引成员

我再次参考美国的交流竞赛经验。我们现在非常熟悉的科技巨头基本上被迫在纳斯达克上市，因为 1970 年代和 80 年代纽约证券交易所的上市资格规则要求公司拥有大量有形资产。换句话说，该交易所并未对新兴科技行业持有的重要知识产权资产给予信任。

这种微妙的歧视形式扩展到标准普尔 500 指数和道琼斯工业平均指数等基准美国指数的成员资格：公司必须在纽约证券交易所上市才有资格被纳入这些指数。多年以来，来自指数用户的压力促使指数提供者改变他们的标准。

多年后，我们发现自己在加拿大也处于同样的境地。S&P/TSX 指数以这些基准衡量了数千亿美元的投资，需要在 TMX 集团之一的交易所上市，公司才有资格被纳入。

这以多种方式扭曲了市场：已经发展到值得考虑纳入标准普尔/多伦多证券交易所指数之一的公司已经不情愿地离开了竞争对手的交易所，搬到了多伦多证券交易所。毫无疑问，指数成员资格的可能性对未来的上市公司很有吸引力。

取消公司在 TMX 集团交易所上市以被纳入加拿大基准指数之一的要求将增强我们领域的竞争。

“Venture Issuer”的特殊含义

这个问题可能是证券交易所行业更好竞争的最微妙但范围最广的障碍。让我从一些背景开始。为促进小公司上市具有成本效益的框架，监管机构为上市公司制定了两套要求：省级证券法中规定的，以及针对更大、更成熟的公司的治理和报告规则，以及为所谓的“风险投资人”设计的一套规范性较低的规则。

不幸的是，该框架没有根据市值、收入、资产或其他客观衡量标准来确定哪些上市公司是“风险发行人”，而是将它们定义为在 TSX 风险交易所和加拿大证券交易所上市的发行人。

该系统在加拿大交易所竞争的早期阶段运行良好。当较小的上市公司在 TSX-V 或 CSE 取得一定程度的成功时，他们通常会将其上市转移到 TSX 或美国交易所。届时，他们将摆脱“风险投资”的标签，并出于披露和治理规则的目的重新归类为“发行人”。

这个标签非常重要，因为“发行人”和“风险发行人”在投资生态系统中并没有得到平等对待：

根据加拿大投资行业监管组织的规定，在 CSE 上市的“风险发行人”没有资格获得保证金减免。这意味着 CSE 上市公司在客户保证金账户中是不被允许的；这些发行人在经销商存货中的证券按公司监管资本的全部价值入账。这一措施增加了这些发行人的融资成本，并可能让一些经销商完全退出这个空间。

机构投资者的投资授权可能不允许这些资产管理公司购买“风险发行人”的证券，从而缩小了有前途的早期公司甚至一些在“错误”交易所上市的大型发行人的可用资本范围。

一些国际指数提供商不会考虑将“风险发行人”纳入其指数，从而拒绝公司向投资者提供风险敞口并阻碍公司扩大其公司证券投资者范围的尝试。

由于 CSE 最近在吸引和留住更大的发行人方面取得了成功，特别是在全球大麻行业，成功公司从 CSE 跳到 TSX 的“正常”演变已经破裂。CSE 现在已成为规模更大、更先进的公司的可靠家园，这些公司正在利用其 CSE 列表筹集大量资金。去年，CSE 发行人筹集的资金总额超过 60 亿美元，而 2016 年约为 5 亿美元。今年已经超过去年的总额。流动性指标也显示 CSE 优于 TSX-V 和 NEO 交易所，并且在过去几年的很长一段时间内都超过了 TSX 本身产生的指标。

虽然我们很高兴大型发行人选择长期将 CSE 作为他们的家，但“风险发行人”的地位已成为一个真正的问题。这些较大的 CSE 上市公司，其中一些市值达数十亿美元，与竞争对手交易所的可比公司相比，处于显着劣势，这些公司有资格获得保证金减免和我上面概述的其他好处。

我们可以等待各种监管机构解决竞争失衡问题，但根据我们作为市场破坏者的本性，我们正在正面解决这些问题。

我们正在重新制定我们的上市政策，为在 CSE 上市的公司创建两条轨道：一条为“风险发行人”，另一条为更成熟的公司。根据新规定，大多数公司仍将是“风险发行人”。然而，更大和更先进的公司将被重新分类，让他们（希望）在 TSX 上享受与“发行人”相同的好处。因此，他们将正式受制于更具规范性的公司治理制度，该制度反映了证券法和相关交易规则为现有“发行人”制定的政策。

我们与监管机构一起努力制定了我们的上市政策修订版，并在此处发布了拟议的更改以征询公众意见：

https//thecse.com/en/about/publications/notices/notice-2021-005-request-for -comments-proposed-policy-amendments

整个投资界都应该支持我们的提议。这只是一个公平和常识的问题。通过解决本应在多年前处理的法规，我们可以改善加拿大发行人和投资者的竞争格局，并确保未来拥有强大而充满活力的资本形成生态系统。

英文：

One of the very best aspects of the Canadian capital markets is our ability to provide funding to early-stage companies. With a successful history of financing mining and oil and gas exploration, the industry has applied its skills in more recent years to support innovation in a broad range of sectors such as technology and life sciences. This has resulted in notable recent success for companies in the legal cannabis sector.

Canada is a world leader in the provision of capital to companies from around the world in these fast-growing new industries. Recent investment themes include the development of medical applications for the treatment of mental health issues with psychedelic compounds, and backing for the rise of cryptocurrencies and supporting technologies that are driving efficiencies in the payments sphere and the provision of financial services.

As with any industry, competition in the provision of stock exchange services in Canada have benefited issuer companies and investors alike.

The Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) launched 18 years ago with a mission to provide public issuers with a streamlined, lower-cost alternative to the Toronto Stock Exchange and TSX Venture Exchange. We succeeded. The CSE is now home to more than 700 active listings and has attracted more global issuers of greater size and maturity over the last few years than at any other point in its history.

Greater competition, including other new exchanges launched after the CSE, has clearly benefited Canada’s investment community, as well as the companies and investors that it serves.

That said, we can and should be doing a much better job of enabling competition in the provision of exchange services to companies, brokers, and investors. Here are a few examples of the challenges faced by new entrants, and some potential solutions.

Market Data

In the United States, an industry consortium collects and processes real-time market information from the stock exchanges and then provides access to the data for all the securities listed on each exchange (Nasdaq, NYSE and NYSE American) for a single fee. In other words, regardless of where a particular security trades, and at last count there were 16 venues, an interested investor can “see” every trade and current quotation.

This is not the case in Canada. In an environment where almost half of the trading in TSX and TSX Venture Exchange stocks occurs on different marketplaces, investors are forced to deal with the venues individually to see the full picture. Many people, who either don’t understand our convoluted market structure, or do not want to pay these separate fees, opt to take the data from the incumbent exchange only. This leads to a series of issues:

When trading is disrupted for any reason on the TMX Group exchanges, Canadian liquidity dries up precipitously. In the United States, when the major exchanges have technical issues, the other markets pick up the slack without missing a beat. Canadian markets are not nearly as resilient as they could be.

With large segments of the industry not having access to meaningful market data, and this group includes the professional retail advisors at the national investment dealers, the lack of transparency does little to enhance confidence in the functioning of Canada’s stock markets. People naturally assume that if they can’t see trading activity, that something unwholesome is going on. This lack of transparency breeds a lack of confidence in the operation of the markets.

Index Membership

I again refer to the experience of exchange competition in the United States. The tech giants we now know so well were essentially forced to go public on Nasdaq, because NYSE’s listings qualification rules during the 1970s and 80s required a company to have significant tangible assets. In other words, the exchange didn’t give credit to the important intellectual property assets held by the rising technology sector.

This subtle form of discrimination extended to membership in the benchmark US indices such as the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average: companies were required to be listed on the NYSE to be eligible for inclusion in these indices. It took many years of pressure from users of the indices to spur the index providers into changing their criteria.

We find ourselves in the same situation in Canada years later. The S&P/TSX indices, with hundreds of billions of investment dollars measured against these benchmarks, require a listing on one of the TMX Group exchanges for a company to be eligible for inclusion.

This has distorted the market in a variety of ways: companies that have grown to a size warranting consideration for inclusion in one of the S&P/TSX indices have left, unwillingly, a competitor exchange to move to the Toronto Stock Exchange. Make no mistake, the possibility of index membership is attractive to prospective listed companies.

Eliminating the requirement that a company be listed on a TMX Group exchange in order to be included in one of Canada’s benchmark indices will enhance competition in our space.

The Peculiar Meaning of “Venture Issuer”

This issue is perhaps the most subtle, yet wide ranging barrier to better competition in the stock exchange industry. Let me start with a bit of background. To promote a framework where it is cost effective for small companies to go public, regulators have created two sets of requirements for public companies: those set out in the provincial securities acts with rules for governance and reporting for larger, more mature companies, and a less prescriptive set of rules designed for so-called “Venture Issuers.”

Unfortunately, instead of identifying which public companies are “Venture Issuers” based on objective measures like market capitalization, revenues, assets or other objective measures, the framework instead defines them as issuers listed on the TSX Venture Exchange and the Canadian Securities Exchange.

This system worked reasonably well during the early stages of exchange competition in Canada. When smaller public companies reached a certain level of success on the TSX-V or CSE, they would typically move their listing to the TSX or a US exchange. At that point, they would shed the “Venture” label and be re-classified as “Issuers” for the purposes of their disclosure and governance rules.

This labelling is extremely important because “Issuers” and “Venture Issuers” are not treated equally in the investment ecosystem:

CSE-listed “Venture Issuers” are not eligible for margin relief under the rules of the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada. This means that CSE-listed companies are not permissible in client margin accounts; securities of these issuers in dealer inventory are carried at full value against the firm’s regulatory capital. This measure increases the cost of financing for these issuers and can keep some dealers out of the space altogether.

Investment mandates from institutional investors may not permit these asset managers to purchase the securities of “Venture Issuers,” narrowing the range of capital available for promising early-stage companies and even some larger issuers listed on the “wrong” exchange.

Some international index providers will not consider “Venture Issuers” for inclusion in their indices, denying companies exposure to investors and frustrating a company’s attempts to increase the range of investors in their company’s securities.

Thanks to the CSE’s recent success in attracting and retaining larger issuers, particularly in the global cannabis sector, the “normal” evolution of successful companies jumping from the CSE to the TSX has broken down. The CSE is now established as a credible home for larger, more advanced companies, which are using their CSE listings to raise serious amounts of money. The total capital raised by CSE issuers last year exceeded $6 billion, compared to about $0.5 billion in 2016. Last year’s total has already been exceeded this year. Liquidity measures also show the CSE in a superior light to the TSX-V and NEO exchanges and have exceeded the measures produced by the TSX itself for significant periods of time over the last few years.

While we are delighted that larger issuers are choosing to make the CSE their home over the longer term, the “Venture Issuer” status has become a real problem. These larger CSE-listed companies, some of which have market capitalizations in the billions of dollars, are at a significant disadvantage to comparable companies on rival exchanges that are eligible for margin relief and the other benefits I outlined above.

We could wait for the various regulators to address the competitive imbalance, but true to our nature as disruptors in the marketplace, we are tackling these problems head on.

We are in the long process of rewriting our listing policies to create two tracks for companies listed on the CSE: one for “Venture Issuers” and another for more mature companies. Under the new rules most companies will remain “Venture Issuers.” The larger and more advanced companies will, however, get reclassified, allowing them to (hopefully) enjoy the same benefits as “Issuers” on the TSX. Accordingly, they will be formally subject to a more prescriptive corporate governance regime that mirrors the policies set out for existing “Issuers” under securities law and related exchange rules.

We have worked hard with regulators to formulate this revision of our listing policies and have published the proposed changes for public comment here: https://thecse.com/en/about/publications/notices/notice-2021-005-request-for-comments-proposed-policy-amendments

The entire investment community should support our proposal. It is simply a matter of fairness and common sense. By addressing regulations that should have been dealt with years ago, we can enhance the competitive landscape for issuers and investors in Canada and ensure a strong and vibrant capital formation ecosystem well into the future.

原文链接：https://blog.thecse.com/promoting-a-level-playing-field-for-all-publicly-traded-companies-in-canada/

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