Stock Exchanges Editing and Proofreading Services

An exchange is a rulebook with a matching engine attached. Its authority over listed companies, members and market data customers rests entirely on published text, and that text is tested constantly — by issuers arguing that a rule does not apply to them, by members disputing a fee schedule, and occasionally by a regulator asking why a market was halted or was not. Exchanges also have to explain themselves to the public within minutes when something goes wrong, in language that neither overstates nor conceals.

We edit what exchanges and market operators produce — listing rules and rulebook amendments, guidance notes and technical guidance for issuers, admission and continuing obligation documentation, market notices and member circulars, trading halt and suspension announcements, market outage and incident communications, market model and microstructure documentation, trading and clearing member agreements, fee schedules and tariff notices, market data licensing and distribution policies, consultation papers and feedback statements on rule changes, surveillance and disciplinary notices, and index methodology and consultation documents. Our editors check that rule text is unambiguous about who is obliged to do what and by when, and that guidance is clearly distinguished from the rules it interprets.

The trading halt notice is the exchange's most scrutinised piece of writing, because it is published in minutes and read by everyone in the market simultaneously. The failure modes are equally damaging in both directions: a notice so terse that participants speculate, or one so hedged that nobody can tell whether the issue is with the exchange or with an issuer. We write these so the first line states what is halted — a single instrument, a segment, or the whole market — and under which rule, so the reason is given at the level of specificity available at that moment, including the honest statement that the cause is not yet known, so the position of orders already in the book is addressed, and so the notice commits to a time for the next update and keeps it. We work on the templates in advance, with the variants pre-drafted, because writing this well at the moment of an outage is not realistic and every exchange that has tried has learned it the same way.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including draft rule changes, incident documentation and disciplinary material. We are editors rather than lawyers or market structure advisers, and we offer no view on regulatory substance — rule text requires your own legal and regulatory approval. What we can do is make the drafting precise and the public communications clear under pressure.