The Alternative Investment Management Association ("AIMA") updated its Guide to Sound Practices for Hedge Fund Valuation. The new additions to the guide include: a summary of valuation requirements under AIFMD; a revised introduction to international guidance on and disclosures of fair value accounting; recommendations that reflect industry sound practices within areas of governance, transparency, procedures and process; and a new outline of areas of hedge fund valuation that are now covered by regulation and those in which discretion still applies. See: AIMA Press Release.

The SEC approved proposed rule changes to FINRA Rule 2360 ("Options") and Rule 4210 ("Margin Requirements") relating to the treatment of over-the-counter ("OTC") options cleared by the Options Clearing Corporations ("OCC"). The amendments to Rule 2360 treat OCC Cleared OTC Options as conventional options (rather than as "standardized"; i.e., exchange-listed) for purposes of the rule, and amend certain of the definitions in the rule, among other changes. The amendments to Rule 4210 include changes to certain definitions in order to provide for the same margin treatment for OCC Cleared OTC

Ohio Securities Commissioner Andrea Seidt has begun a one-year term as president of the North American Securities Administrators Association ("NASAA"). For the past year, Seidt served as NASAA's vice president and chair of the Investment Adviser Section. In her inaugural address in Salt Lake City, Seidt said that NASAA's agenda for state and provincial securities will continue to focus on "smarter regulation," highlighting specifically a plan for the development of NASAA's own electronic filing system for multi-state offerings. See: NASAA Press Release; Commissioner Seidt's Inaugural Address.

Economist Craig Pirrong (" A Tower of Babel: OTC Derivatives Edition," Streetwise Professor) discussed a recent speech by Beniot Coeuré of the European Central Bank ("ECB") in which Coeuré argued that global regulators have created a system for the reporting of OTC derivatives transactions which does not promote transparency. According to Coeuré, privacy laws, blocking statutes, and indemnification clauses in several jurisdictions all restrict access to the details of OTC derivatives transactions, which prevents regulators from being able to aggregate data across trade repositories. Pirrong

The MSRB released a report which documents the statistics of the average time it takes the issuers of municipal securities, and other obligated persons to make their financial information available to the public after the end of a fiscal year. The report is the first of its kind. It analyzes the submissions of financial disclosures made to the MSRB's Electronic Municipal Market Access ("EMMA") system between January 2010 and June 2013, and measures the number of days after the end of a fiscal year in which audited financial statements and annual financial information were made available