One region, many rulebooks: market-abuse surveillance across Asia

What counts as abuse, and what gets recorded?

Market-abuse surveillance has a shared reference frame, and two instruments set most of it. The first is the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR), the European Union's harmonized statement of what abuse is: insider dealing, unlawful disclosure of inside information, and market manipulation, each defined in its own article and applied uniformly across member states.¹ The second is the Consolidated Audit Trail (CAT), the American model of what a market should record. Adopted under Securities and Exchange Commission Rule 613, it requires a time-sequenced record of every quote and order in a National Market System security, documenting each reportable event across the life of an order: origination, modification, cancellation, routing, and execution.² That sequence is the order–trade–fulfillment lifecycle rendered as a reporting obligation.

Between them, the two supply the discipline's default vocabulary: a common definition of abuse and a common model of the record. A firm moving east does the diligence; the question is what the diligence surfaces. What it surfaces, across Asia, is that the shared frame is a starting point rather than a settled map, and that each market has written its own rulebook around the same underlying concerns. Even the market that authored CAT is taking a fresh look at its own: the Commission issued a concept release in April 2026 inviting comment on the trail's future shape and cost.³ The reference frame is not fixed, not even in the jurisdictions that built it.

What follows reads five Asian markets against three questions: what counts as abuse, what a trade must record, and what has to be reconstructed once the trading is done. The first is the one the markets share. What counts as abuse barely moves across the region; marking the close, spoofing, cross-product manipulation, and insider dealing on price-sensitive information are prohibited in much the same terms everywhere, and applied under codified law rather than invented case by case. What each market writes for itself is the answer to the other two, and where along the lifecycle it chooses to meet the same conduct.

India: enforcement by reconstruction and traceability at source

On July 3, 2025, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) issued an ex-parte interim order against four Jane Street entities, restraining their market access and impounding about $566 million in alleged unlawful gains.⁴ The order's theory was cross-segment. Reconstructed across expiry days over January 2023 to May 2025, SEBI's account describes aggressive activity in Bank Nifty and Nifty constituent stocks and futures, sized to move the index, set against options positions that stood to gain from the move, together with episodes SEBI characterized as marking the close.

What matters here is not the amount impounded but the definition SEBI applied, and where it came from. The order did not invent a category. It rested on codified law: Section 12A of the SEBI Act and Regulations 3 and 4 of the Prohibition of Fraudulent and Unfair Trade Practices Regulations, which prohibit manipulative conduct and the creation of a false or misleading appearance of trading.⁵ What was new was the application. India read those standing prohibitions onto an algorithmic, cross-segment, expiry-day pattern that became visible only once the cash, futures, and options legs were stitched back together. India's distinctive move is therefore not a home-grown definition of abuse, which it shares with most markets, but the reconstruction of a footprint spread across products and the readiness to call the result manipulation.

The structural response changes that footprint at the point it begins. SEBI's circular of February 4, 2025 sets a framework for retail algorithmic trading: the broker stands as principal and the algorithm provider as its agent; algorithms are sorted into white-box and black-box categories; a kill switch and a per-second order threshold govern access; and every registered algorithm carries a unique, exchange-assigned identifier that tags automated orders at origination.⁶ After two extensions, the framework became mandatory for all brokers from April 1, 2026.⁷ Insider dealing runs on a separate codified track: the Prohibition of Insider Trading Regulations define unpublished price-sensitive information and, through system-driven disclosures, track the trades of designated persons against the windows when that information is live.⁸ Underneath both sits a standing market-wide surveillance system, the Integrated Market Surveillance System, which draws daily data from the exchanges and depositories to flag manipulation and insider-dealing patterns; SEBI has also consolidated its graded and additional surveillance measures into a single master framework, reissued in May 2026.⁹ India's answer, in short: traceability built in at the source, and the definition of abuse written in the enforcement.

Korea: rebuilding the unit of the record

Korea rebuilt the apparatus that would apply surveillance measures. In July 2025 the Financial Services Commission (FSC), with the Financial Supervisory Service and the Korea Exchange (KRX), set out a package of measures against unfair trading. Two elements stand out. A standing joint response team was established to shorten the distance between a finding of wrongdoing and action on it. And surveillance was moved from an account basis to an entity basis, so that scattered accounts controlled by the same party resolve to a single subject.¹⁰

In February 2026 KRX brought an artificial-intelligence system into operation, drawing on online posts, video, and price data to identify shares carrying a high probability of manipulation, with human review before any action follows.¹¹

The account-to-entity change is the deeper one, and it is easy to underrate as plumbing. It alters what the record resolves to. The same sequence of trades, once reconstructed, now attaches to a person or a coordinated group rather than to a spray of accounts. This is the question India answered case by case in the Jane Street order, where four separate entities were treated as one group and a single actor held responsible; Korea builds the same resolution into the apparatus, ahead of any particular case. Korea's divergence is therefore in the unit of reconstruction itself: not a faster reading of the footprint, but a redefinition of whose footprint it is.

Australia: the reporting layer beneath surveillance

Surveillance inherits the quality of the data reported beneath it, and Australia's contribution to the region's divergence sits at exactly that layer. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) requires every over-the-counter derivative to be reported to a licensed trade repository, each transaction tagged with a Legal Entity Identifier for each counterparty, a Unique Transaction Identifier for the deal, and a Unique Product Identifier for the product, alongside a common set of critical data elements carried in the ISO 20022 message format. The current rules commenced in October 2024 and have been aligned, in stages, to those international data standards.¹²

The March 2026 consultation, CS48, reworks the fields inside that report: it proposes to adopt the December 2025 international guidance on how a derivative's underlier is identified, to change how lifecycle events such as amendments and terminations are recorded, and to revise what collateral and margin a firm must report, for a proposed commencement in March 2027.¹³ This is Australia's divergence, and it is not in the definition of abuse but in the reporting layer: what a trade must capture, and how it is named, before any surveillance can read it.

Singapore: codified offenses, supervised surveillance

Singapore's market-misconduct offenses are set out in statute. Part 12 of the Securities and Futures Act defines the prohibited conduct, among it false trading and market rigging, market manipulation, and insider trading, with the false-trading and manipulation prohibitions at sections 197 to 201;¹⁴ the Singapore Exchange rulebooks and their practice notes elaborate the conduct expected of trading members.¹⁵ The definition of abuse is codified, not improvised. What the enforcement record adds is the shape those provisions take in practice. In its report covering July 2023 to December 2024, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) opened 163 review and investigation cases, of which 58 concerned market misconduct such as insider trading and false trading, the largest single category.¹⁶

The cases show how the statutory language bites. In January 2025 MAS imposed a civil penalty on an individual who had inflated the closing prices of two listed stocks across hundreds of trading days, using employees' accounts to place unauthorized purchases toward the same end.¹⁷ The conduct is a variant of what other markets call marking the close: trading into the closing period to set an artificial reference price. The behavior is not peculiar to Singapore; the same instinct appears in the marking-the-close findings of the Jane Street order in India.

Where Singapore reaches furthest is into the firm itself. The MAS-SGX Trade Surveillance Practice Guide, issued jointly by MAS and Singapore Exchange Regulation, expects brokers to run their own surveillance programs and to back-test those programs against historical data and review them at least annually, so that the models still work as markets change.¹⁸ Singapore's divergence is therefore not in inventing a definition of abuse but in how far the rulebook reaches: from the statute that names the offense, to the exchange rules that govern conduct, to the surveillance desk whose own models must be validated.

Hong Kong: codifying the footprint before the order

Not all abuse begins with an order, and Hong Kong has codified the stage before one exists. The Securities and Futures Commission (SFC) issued Guidelines for Market Soundings, gazetted in November 2024 and effective from May 2, 2025, setting expectations for how licensed intermediaries handle price-sensitive information when they gauge investor interest ahead of a transaction, and how they keep a record of having done so.¹⁹ This is the concern MAR states in its market-soundings article, rendered in Hong Kong's own register and its own instrument: the information footprint that forms before an order is ever placed.

The perimeter is moving outward as well as backward. The SFC's regulatory roadmap for virtual assets, styled ASPIRe, sets out building market-wide surveillance capability within the regulator and shifting from reporting triggered by incidents toward oversight exercised ahead of them.²⁰ Hong Kong's answer to what a trade must record therefore stretches in two directions at once: back into the conversation that precedes the order, and out to venues beyond the traditional securities perimeter.

What "one region" conceals

Five markets, and five different points along the order–trade–fulfillment lifecycle where each regime attaches to the footprint. India reconstructs a cross-product footprint to apply its codified prohibitions, and pushes traceability to the point of origination. Korea rebuilds the unit the record resolves to, from account to entity. Australia refines what a trade records and how it is named. Singapore codifies the offense in statute and supervises the surveillance program that must catch it. Hong Kong extends the footprint before the order and beyond the familiar perimeter. None of these is a local flavor of a single rulebook. Each is a rulebook. The manipulative instincts recur across borders, the hidden principal behind scattered accounts, the trade placed into the close to set a price; what diverges is not the abuse but where along the lifecycle each market chooses to meet it, and the rulebook it writes there: the definition applied, the record required, the reconstruction expected.

Each market answers what must be reconstructable on its own terms, so the same firm reconstructs against a different standard at each border. That is the exact inverse of the premise the shared frame rests on. And because even the origin markets are reopening their own designs, there is no fixed template to carry east in the first place, only a set of assumptions each Asian market has already declined in its own way.

Where the data physically resides, and whether it can be assembled at all once the codes have traveled and the records have stayed home, is a separate question, taken up elsewhere in these pages. The divergence traced here is prior to that one: not where the record sits, but what it is required to be. The rulebook is written one jurisdiction at a time, and so, in the end, is the reconstruction.