RE: ISA31 Jul 2019 12:02
FootieladBaz,
I posted something on one of the boards here about 2 to 3 weeks ago on this as it crops up everywhere.
There is currently no requirement to inform the market whether a trade is a buy or sell at the point of execution, only a set of basics such as the amount of shares, price, trade amount, exact date and time plus a few other incidentals and notification must be made within a maximum of 15 minutes of trading (hence many sites reporting delayed trade prices)
It is a European directive under MiFID II.
FULL trade details only need to be reported to the relevant exchange (London Stock Exchange in this case, to avoid confusion with this LSE site) on T+1, so all sites like this can only report trade direction on a best efforts basis. The London Stock Exchange requires all firms, exchanges, platforms to report trades in a set format, hence only they will receive the full details on this delayed basis.
There are millions of trades executed daily on multiple platforms and exchanges, so it would be nigh on impossible to report everything at the point of execution, so firms will only report what is required.
Firms use many different trading platforms and they do not 'talk' to each other so collating all the information accurately to notify the market in such a short space of time would be very difficult to do unless everyone only traded on one trading platform and with one MM (and then there would not be any market).
Everyone seems to think reporting accurate information is simple, but it really is not when you look at all the different factors involved, although it is strange that the Buy/Sell indicator is not one of the required fields (maybe this is on purpose to help make the market).