China took another step to obscure information about overseas funds going into and out of its sagging stock market, saying it will stop publishing daily flows data in the middle of August.

The decision, which was hinted at in April and made explicit by the country’s stock exchanges on Friday, follows a move in May to end data on intraday flows through trading links with Hong Kong. Investors will lose the ability to calculate net flows at the end of each trading day from Aug 18.

The only daily data published by the exchanges from that date will be the total turnover and the number of trades made in stocks and exchange-traded funds via the Hong Kong links, as well as the turnover of the 10 most active securities.

Starting from the August deadline, the combined data on so-called northbound flows into individual stocks will only be made available quarterly, the exchanges also said. Data on the holdings of global investors in individual stocks will be released on the fifth trading day of each quarter, for the close of the previous period.

The latest retreat from disclosure follows attempts by Chinese policymakers to prop up faltering confidence among local investors, which has been battered by an outflow of global funds. Overseas money managers offloaded about 30 billion yuan of mainland shares in July through Friday, set for the biggest monthly outflow since October.

Despite the coming end to the daily data, investors will still be able to gauge the direction of fund flows into Chinese stocks through quarterly reports published by the central bank on financial assets held by overseas entities. Still, that data is subject to a lag of at least a month and has been prone to unexplained delays.

Real-time trading data for flows from mainland China to Hong Kong (referred to as the southbound data) will still available after the August deadline, a spokesperson at Hong Kong Exchanges & Clearing Ltd told Bloomberg in response to a request for clarification.

  - Bloomberg