MAR surveillance where power trading meets financial instruments
A desk trading European power is frequently in scope of both REMIT and the Market Abuse Regulation, on different parts of the same book. The boundary is not always obvious, and the evidence a compliance function needs is largely the same on either side of it.
Where the boundary falls
Regulation (EU) No 596/2014 — MAR — covers financial instruments admitted to trading on a regulated market, an MTF or an OTF, and instruments whose price depends on those. REMIT covers wholesale energy products that are not financial instruments. The two are drafted to avoid overlap, and REMIT Article 1(2) disapplies it where MAR already bites.
In practice a power book straddles the line. Physical day-ahead and intraday trades on a coupled exchange sit under REMIT. Power futures and options on a regulated venue sit under MAR. And behaviour in the physical market can move the settlement of a financial contract, which is the case both regimes are most concerned about — cross-market manipulation, where a position in one venue is the reason for conduct in the other.
Why the same evidence serves both
MAR Article 12 defines manipulation to include transactions that give false or misleading signals as to supply, demand or price, and transactions that secure the price of an instrument at an abnormal or artificial level. Establishing either requires the same thing REMIT does: a defensible view of what the price should have been, and a record of what it actually was.
TradingSurv’s auction reconstruction produces that view for the physical market. Where a financial position settles against a physical index — and most European power derivatives do — the reconstructed hour is directly relevant evidence for a MAR investigation, even though the reconstruction itself is of a REMIT-scope market.
What this product does not do
TradingSurv has no view of a firm’s own order and trade feed today. It surveils the published market, not your book. That means the MAR typologies that depend on seeing your own orders — layering, spoofing, wash trades, marking the close on a specific instrument — are not covered. Post-trade controls over a customer’s own feed are planned and not yet built.
Nor does it cover Article 16’s STOR obligation as a workflow. It produces evidence that informs whether a report is warranted; submitting one remains a decision and a process owned by the firm.
What it does do
It answers the market-side half of the question. For any delivery hour in a covered zone: what cleared, what a merit order built from published fundamentals says should have cleared, how far apart those are relative to the model’s calibrated out-of-sample error, and what the hour would have cleared at under a counterfactual. That is the context a MAR alert generated off a firm’s own feed usually lacks, and the reason most such alerts cannot be closed quickly.