Never give information to the enemy.

"Douwe  Miedema of Reuters covered yesterday’s meeting of the CFTC’s Technology Advisory Committee and reports that:

The U.S. derivatives watchdog on Monday chided the industry for providing gappy data on the $630 trillion market… “I do want to get away from the handholding,” said Vincent McGonagle, the CFTC’s head of the Division of Market Oversight. “It is clear that there are issues where parties are not reporting,” he said.

What is he talking about?

I’m guessing that this is an example. ICE Trade Vault is a Swap Data Repository for commodity products, including financial power. In addition to running its data repository, ICE is a lead platform for trade in these products. According to data compiled by one of its platform competitors, Nodal Exchange, and provided to the CFTC’s Division of Market Oversight, the data feeds from ICE Trade Vault lack some of the most pertinent information about transactions:

…of the 33,030 financial power transactions reported by ICE Trade Vault in 2013, we found that 21,054, or 64% were listed as “exotic” and lacked basic transaction information such as the unit of volume and the product transacted. Furthermore, only 11,973 transactions, or 36%, of all financial power transactions reported by ICE Trade Vault contained any price information.
We were also dismayed to see that for even the relatively well described transactions denominated in Megawatt Hours (MWh) reported by ICE Trade Vault, the vast majority (11,214 of 11,893 transactions, or 94.5%) had, at best, only a generic region or Regional Transmission Operator (RTO) or Independent System Operator (ISO) identified. We believe this lack of specificity is largely unwarranted. For example, many transactions reported by ICE Trade Vault simply show “PJM”, a Regional Transmission Operator covering all or parts of 13 states plus the District of Columbia. However, on ICE Futures U.S., ICE offers futures contracts covering 13 distinct zonal locations and four hub locations within PJM, providing a ready basis for more specific locational reporting for ICE Trade Vault as well. Financial power information is really only useful if it conveys what product is traded (specific power location), at what price, and for what volume. This information is available on only 607 of the 33,030 financial power transactions, or 1.8%, as reported by ICE Trade Vault.

Trade reporting is the law, but there is obviously a long way to go before its a reality."

at http://bettingthebusiness.com/2014/02/11/never-give-information-to-the-enemy/