Understanding Swiss Insider Filings: Public Yet Opaque, Sigma Journal

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The Swiss compromise is not an accident

Switzerland did not stumble into anonymous insider disclosures through administrative laziness. It built a regime that treats management transactions as relevant market information, while stopping short of naming the individual in the public feed. The public sees the issuer, the date, the type of transaction, the position of the person involved, and the size of the trade. What it usually does not see is the person's name.

That distinction matters more than it first appears. A named filing lets outside investors ask whether the same executive has bought stock across multiple drawdowns, whether a chair has sold repeatedly into strength, whether a finance chief's transactions line up awkwardly with earnings guidance, or whether a director appears across several issuers with suspiciously good timing. An anonymous filing allows some of those inferences at the company level, but cuts the link between one human being and a sequence of market actions.

What the public actually gets from SIX

Under SIX Exchange Regulation's management transactions framework, issuers must report transactions by members of the board of directors and executive committee. SIX then publishes the transaction data. The published record typically includes the issuer, the function of the person, the transaction date, the nature of the instrument, the transaction type and the transaction value or price information. The natural person's name is not part of the public disclosure.

This is not a minor formatting choice. It is the central design feature of the Swiss system.

The rationale is usually framed in terms of personality rights and data protection. Switzerland has a strong legal culture around personal privacy, and a named insider transaction is plainly personal data. If the regulatory objective can be met by disclosing the trade without the name, the Swiss instinct has often been to choose the narrower publication.

Why this sits awkwardly with market integrity

FINMA's statutory mission includes protecting creditors, investors and the proper functioning of financial markets. Market integrity, in Swiss regulatory language, is not decorative. It is a core objective. Insider dealing and market manipulation are prohibited under the Financial Market Infrastructure Act, and supervisory architecture is built around preserving confidence in fair price formation.

Here is the tension. If market integrity is the goal, identity can be highly relevant information. Not because every insider trade is suspicious, most are not, but because patterns of conduct are easier to detect when identities are visible. Anonymous disclosures reduce the ability of journalists, minority shareholders, forensic researchers and even counterparties to connect dots across time and across issuers.

That does not mean the Swiss model fails. It means it optimises for a different balance than regimes that publish names by default.

How the legal plumbing produced anonymity

The phrase "Art 56 SESTA" captures an older legal memory in Swiss securities law, but the present issue is less about one nostalgic article number than about the interaction between public-law market supervision, exchange self-regulation and Swiss privacy principles.

The exchange, not only the state, shapes disclosure

A peculiarity of the Swiss setup is that management transaction disclosure has been strongly mediated through listing rules and exchange regulation rather than through a single, retail-investor-facing statutory tape equivalent to the US SEC's insider ownership database. SIX Exchange Regulation administers the reporting and publication mechanism for listed issuers. That matters because exchange-rule systems often evolve with a more pragmatic, issuer-operational mindset than criminal or supervisory market-abuse rules.

The result is a disclosure product designed to inform the market that insiders are transacting, without fully exposing the insider as an individually searchable public subject.

Privacy is not just a slogan in Swiss law

Swiss law protects personality rights, and personal data processing must satisfy proportionality principles. Publishing a named insider trade is easy to justify if the legislature or regulator explicitly says that naming is necessary to achieve market transparency. It is harder to justify if a narrower disclosure can plausibly serve the same purpose.

The Swiss answer has effectively been: disclose enough to alert the market, but not enough to create a public dossier on every executive's personal trading history.

That position has a certain legal neatness. It also has practical costs.

The practical cost of proportionality

A role label such as "CEO", "CFO" or "member of the board of directors" is informative, but only up to a point. In a small issuer with one obvious officeholder, the market may infer the identity anyway. In a larger issuer with several board members or executive committee members, the role can be too coarse to be useful. A filing by "member of the board of directors" tells the market that someone on the board traded. It does not tell investors whether it was the founder-chair, the audit committee chair, or a newly appointed non-executive director with little informational advantage.

This is where the privacy logic starts to look selective rather than absolute. In some cases, anonymity is thin because the role all but reveals the person. In others, it is thick enough to block meaningful accountability.

Europe chose names, Switzerland chose functions

The Swiss model looks unusual when set beside the post-MAR European norm.

Market	Regulator	Rule	Deadline	Notes
CH	SIX Exchange Regulation \/ FINMA	Management Transactions regime	Prompt issuer reporting	Public disclosure generally shows function and transaction details, not the natural person's name.
FR	AMF	MAR Art 19	T+3	Persons discharging managerial responsibilities and closely associated persons are disclosed by name in public filings.
DE	BaFin	MAR Art 19	T+3	Manager transactions are publicly disseminated with named individuals.
EU	National competent authorities	MAR Art 19	T+3	Harmonised named disclosure across member states, subject to local publication mechanics.
US	SEC	Exchange Act Section 16	T+2 for Form 4	Named beneficial owners, officers and directors file transaction reports publicly.

Named-person disclosure is the norm in the EU and US. Switzerland remains the notable holdout among major developed markets.

MAR made identity part of the signal

Under Article 19 of the EU Market Abuse Regulation, persons discharging managerial responsibilities, and persons closely associated with them, must notify transactions once thresholds are met. Those notifications are public, and the identity of the reporting person is part of the disclosure. The logic is straightforward. The market does not merely need to know that some executive traded. It needs to know which executive traded.

That creates a richer information set for price discovery and external monitoring. It also creates a larger privacy intrusion. Europe made its choice explicitly, then wrapped it in harmonised thresholds, deadlines and administrative guidance.

Switzerland's narrower signal

Switzerland's narrower disclosure signal can still be useful. If a cluster of executive committee purchases appears after a drawdown, investors may reasonably infer internal confidence. If a large sale by a board member appears shortly before a strategic reset, that may still attract attention. But the signal is noisier.

Noisy signals are not useless. They are just easier to overread.

This is one reason Swiss management transaction data tends to be more suitable for issuer-level event interpretation than for person-level behavioural analysis. It can tell you that insiders, in aggregate or by broad function, are active. It is less good at telling you whether a particular individual has a credible track record of buying low, selling high, or transacting at moments that deserve closer scrutiny.

What anonymity changes for investors, issuers and watchdogs

The Swiss system has defenders, and not without reason. It reduces the risk of public shaming over routine wealth management, family planning or tax-driven transactions. It may also make some executives less reluctant to comply promptly, because reporting does not automatically turn their personal finances into a searchable public archive.

Still, anonymity changes the economics of oversight.

For investors, the signal becomes harder to rank

A named regime allows a hierarchy of credibility. Founder-CEOs are often interpreted differently from newly hired CFOs. Long-tenured chairs are read differently from independent directors with small holdings. Repeat buyers can earn a reputation. Repeat sellers can too.

An anonymous regime strips away that ranking mechanism. The market gets a role, not a reputation.

That may sound abstract, but it affects how investors process the information. Suppose a Swiss filing shows a purchase by a "member of the board of directors". Is that a token purchase by a non-executive director after an annual grant? Is it a meaningful open-market buy by the founder-chair after a profit warning? The price reaction one might expect from those two cases is not the same. The public filing does not let you distinguish them cleanly.

For issuers, privacy can become a governance shield

From the issuer perspective, anonymity lowers the personal exposure of senior staff. There is a respectable governance argument for that. Not every executive wants a public database of family trust transactions attached to their name forever.

But there is also a less flattering interpretation. Anonymous disclosure can function as a shield against awkward questions. If a senior executive repeatedly sells into rallies while the company publicly projects confidence, the issuer can say it complied with the reporting regime. True enough. Yet outside investors cannot easily assess whether the same person is consistently on the other side of the company's message.

Transparency regimes are often sold as confidence-building devices. They work best when they permit confidence to be tested.

For watchdogs and researchers, cross-issuer pattern analysis weakens

The biggest loss from anonymity may be in pattern detection. Named data allows one to study whether certain individuals repeatedly trade around earnings, M&A events or guidance changes across different issuers and roles. It enables network analysis, recidivism screening and conflict mapping.

Anonymous Swiss data frustrates much of that work. Regulators themselves may still have access to identities through supervisory channels, of course. But public accountability does not run only through regulators. Journalists, minority investors, academics and short sellers all contribute to enforcement pressure. A market in which only the authority can see the whole picture is a market that relies more heavily on official vigilance and less on distributed scrutiny.

The case for anonymity is stronger than transparency advocates admit

It is easy, especially from an Anglo-American perspective, to treat named insider disclosure as obviously superior. Usually it is. But the Swiss position is not irrational, and critics should at least grapple with its best arguments.

Public naming can overshoot the regulatory aim

The purpose of management transaction disclosure is not to entertain the market with executive biography. It is to reduce information asymmetry and support confidence in fair dealing. If role, timing and transaction size already convey most of the economically relevant information, then naming may be an unnecessary increment in personal exposure.

That argument is strongest where the role itself is highly informative and the transaction is clearly routine. It is weakest where the role is generic and the transaction is potentially contentious.

Data permanence changes the stakes

When many disclosure regimes were designed, public records were public in a slightly quaint sense. They existed, but were not frictionlessly searchable, aggregated and republished forever. Today, a named insider filing can become a permanent part of a person's digital profile, scraped into commercial databases and context-stripped by social media.

Swiss caution looks less eccentric in that environment. A proportionality test in 2026 is not the same as a proportionality test in 1996.

There is a difference between supervisory transparency and public transparency

One can defend a system in which regulators and exchanges know the identity, while the public sees only a filtered version. That model says effective enforcement does not require universal publication of personal data. It requires competent authorities with full access and a credible willingness to act.

The obvious objection is that this asks the market to trust the referee and stop asking who committed the foul. Sometimes that is enough. Often it is not.

Where the Swiss model is most vulnerable

If the Swiss framework is going to be criticised, the criticism should be precise.

It creates uneven anonymity

A disclosure that names the exact role but not the person does not protect everyone equally. In a small-cap issuer, "CEO" may identify the person with near certainty. In a large-cap issuer, "member of executive management" may identify no one in particular. The privacy benefit therefore varies wildly by issuer size and governance structure.

That is not ideal policy design. Good disclosure rules should not depend for their privacy effect on how many people sit around the board table.

It weakens deterrence at the margin

Public naming is not just an information device. It is also a deterrent. The prospect of one's name appearing next to a badly timed or poorly explained trade can influence behaviour. Remove the name, and some of that reputational deterrence disappears.

No one should exaggerate this point. Serious insider-dealing deterrence comes from surveillance, enforcement and sanctions, not from embarrassment. Still, reputational discipline is part of the package.

It is out of step with international comparability

Global investors compare insider activity across jurisdictions. A Swiss filing and a French filing may both indicate a management transaction, but they are not equally informative. That hurts comparability, and comparability is one of the quiet virtues of harmonised disclosure standards.

For cross-border funds, this means Swiss insider data often needs a different interpretation layer. A screen that ranks named insider purchases in EU and US markets cannot simply ingest Swiss records as if they were equivalent. The data schema may line up. The informational content does not.

What reform would look like, if Switzerland wanted it

A full shift to named public disclosure would be the cleanest answer. It would also be the most politically difficult. Swiss legal culture tends to prefer calibrated solutions over grand transparency gestures.

Option one, name the person but raise thresholds or narrow categories

One plausible compromise would be to publish names only above a higher materiality threshold, or only for certain roles such as chair, CEO and CFO. That would preserve privacy for low-value or routine transactions while exposing the most market-relevant trades to full scrutiny.

The drawback is obvious. A two-tier system invites gaming around thresholds and creates more complexity.

Option two, publish persistent anonymous identifiers

A more elegant, if slightly nerdier, compromise would be to assign each reporting person a persistent pseudonymous identifier within an issuer, or even across issuers under regulator control. The market would not see the name, but it could observe whether the same person repeatedly buys or sells over time.

That would preserve some privacy while restoring behavioural analysis. It would also acknowledge the basic truth that the value of insider data lies partly in sequence, not just in single events.

Option three, keep anonymity but improve metadata

If Switzerland insists on not naming individuals, it could at least improve the informational content of the role field and transaction context. Distinguish chair from ordinary director. Distinguish open-market trades from option exercises and related disposals. Standardise reason codes. Improve machine readability and archive access.

This would not solve the identity problem. It would, however, reduce some of the current ambiguity.

Anonymous insiders are a policy choice, not a technical limitation

The temptation with disclosure systems is to treat them as neutral plumbing. They are not. Every field included or omitted expresses a view about what the market is entitled to know, what the individual is entitled to keep private, and who should bear the burden of uncertainty.

Switzerland reveals its priorities through omission

By publishing role and amount but not name, Switzerland is saying that the existence of insider trading activity is market-relevant, while the identity of the insider is usually not necessary for public consumption. That is a coherent position. It is also contestable.

In a market that prizes integrity, identity is often part of the fact pattern. The omission therefore tells us something about Swiss regulatory priorities. Privacy and proportionality are not afterthoughts. They are load-bearing beams.

The tension with FINMA will not disappear

FINMA's market-integrity mandate points toward robust transparency and effective detection. Swiss privacy instincts point toward restraint in public naming. Those two principles can coexist, but not without friction. The friction becomes more visible as markets globalise, data science improves and investors expect cross-jurisdiction comparability.

For now, Switzerland continues to sit in the middle ground. It is more transparent than a regime with no public insider transaction disclosure at all. It is less transparent than the EU and US systems that treat identity as part of the signal.

That middle ground has lasted because it is administratively workable and legally defensible. Whether it remains normatively satisfying is another question.

The next practical step is not a grand theory of transparency. It is a narrower test: should Swiss public disclosures at least carry persistent person-level identifiers, even if names remain withheld? That would show whether the country wants to preserve privacy, or preserve opacity. The two are not always the same thing.

Swiss Insider Filings: Balancing Transparency and Privacy