Dear Dominic Stevens, CEO of the ASX,
Investors, analysts, journalists and researchers rely on the ASX to provide free access to company announcements. These independent actors provide a valuable service to your company by shining a light on wrongdoing, analysing accounts, and reporting on shenanigans. Access to this information is essential to an efficient market.
Your new website claims to provide access to “Market announcements released from 1 November 2002 onwards are available on the ASX website in PDF format. Earlier market announcements are available as edited text versions.”
However, it currently only provides access to announcements as far back as about 2015. This is clear from the API providing this data.
Furthermore, when you scroll back in time to see past announcements, the platform itself doesn’t even indicate the full date of the announcement. Rather, it includes only month, day and time. So, where it is even possible, it is much harder to research past announcements, than with the old website.
Was this website re-designed through consultation with actual users? How much shareholder capital did you spend on this rebuild?
By making it harder for people to research the history of a company, you are reducing the integrity of the ASX. Your redesign has been called a ‘huge fail’ in the media; but I would go further. Your new website is a disgrace. By making it harder for market participants to research a company you make it harder for them to make sensible, informed decisions about investments. By making research harder, you will discourage it. And that will end badly for some investors.
Worse still, the ASX website currently claims to host announcement as far back as 2002. However this is not the case. What impact does making such an incorrect claim have on users? If not in a legal, then certainly in a moral sense, this is an absolute travesty. The website returns “no results” for all searches for announcements prior to 2015, but claims to host all announcements back to 2002. Therefore, a reasonable person would conclude that the company did not have any announcements in the period queried, based on the ASX website itself. In that way, the new ASX website is clearly misleading.
Please reinstate the old website immediately.
And readers, please consider providing feedback to the ASX on their website through this link (it only works for me sometimes). Better still, please email them at [email protected]
Finally please do sign this petition to get the ASX to restore the full history of announcements.
Addendum: It has also just come to my attention that you can’t search for tickers that are no longer listed. This means that if a company changes ticker (and problematic companies do this all the time) then you can’t easily access their past announcements under the old ticker. In comparison, the old website did allow you to search for announcements from delisted companies. This is of key importance when tracking individuals who have a track record of poor performance as company directors.
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