A friend who trades US insider filings asked me a while back where the UK version lives, because he wanted to run the same screen on London-listed names and kept coming up empty. The short answer is that the UK has a version of Form 4, it just does not call it that, does not file it with the SEC, and in some cases lands faster than the American equivalent. Once you know where to look, screening director dealings on the LSE is not harder than screening Form 4s. It is a different plumbing job with a slightly different clock.
The thing worth internalizing first is that the UK regime is built for the reader, not the filer. The deadlines are tight and the disclosure is standardized. If you have spent time waiting on a Form 4 to show up two business days after a trade, the UK cadence is going to feel almost aggressive by comparison.
What a PDMR notification actually is
PDMR stands for Person Discharging Managerial Responsibilities. In practice that is your directors, plus senior executives who have regular access to inside information and the authority to make managerial decisions. It also captures people closely associated with them, which means spouses, dependent children, and certain entities the PDMR controls. So a director's wife buying shares, or a company the director owns buying shares, both trigger a notification. That closely-associated net is wider than a lot of people expect, and it is the same logic the US uses to sweep in family and controlled entities.
The rule that governs all of this is UK MAR, the Market Abuse Regulation as it applies in the UK. Under Article 19, once a PDMR or a closely associated person deals in the issuer's shares or debt instruments, or related derivatives, above a small threshold in a calendar year, the trade has to be disclosed. The threshold is low, low enough that most meaningful director trades clear it easily, and once you cross it every subsequent trade that year gets reported too.
The mechanics: the PDMR notifies both the company and the FCA promptly, and the deadline is short, historically within a few business days of the transaction. The company then makes a public announcement, again promptly and typically within the same tight window. So you often get the market disclosure faster than a US Form 4, which runs on a two-business-day clock from the trade. Not always faster, but the UK does not have the same lag between the executive's obligation and the public seeing it, because both obligations sit close together.
Where these actually get published
US filings live on EDGAR. UK ones live on RNS, the Regulatory News Service, which is the official channel a listed company uses to release regulatory information. When you hear a UK trader say a stock "put out an RNS," this is what they mean. Director dealing notifications go out as RNS announcements, usually with a headline that says something like "Director/PDMR Shareholding" or "Transaction in Own Shares" if it is a buyback, or names the notification directly.
The format is standardized because UK MAR prescribes it. Every PDMR notification carries the same fields, which is what makes screening tractable. You get the name of the person, their reason for being a PDMR, the issuer, the nature of the transaction, the instrument, the price, the volume, the date, and the place of the trade. Because the schema is fixed, you can parse these the same way you would parse a Form 4's transaction table. The reason code, the buy-versus-sell, the size, all of it sits in known positions.
The closed period, which is the part US traders miss
Here is the piece that has no clean US analog and changes how you read the signal. UK MAR imposes a closed period of roughly thirty days before the announcement of interim and annual financial results, during which a PDMR is generally prohibited from dealing at all. There are narrow exceptions, things like exercising options that would otherwise lapse, or dealing under a pre-agreed plan, but the default is a hard no.
Why this matters for screening: a director buy that lands right after results come out is a director who waited out the closed period and chose to buy at the first legal opportunity. That is a different quality of signal than a buy that happens at a random point in the calendar. When you see a cluster of PDMR buys in the days immediately after an interim or annual results RNS, you are often looking at people who were sitting on the sidelines by law and moved the moment the window opened. It does not make them right, but it tells you the timing was constrained, not casual.
The inverse is also useful. A sale during what should be an open window, well away from results, from a director who is not a habitual seller, reads differently than routine option-driven selling. The closed-period calendar gives you context that raw US filings do not hand you as directly.
A workflow you can actually run
If you want to screen LSE director dealings the way you screen Form 4s, here is roughly how I would structure it.
- Pull RNS announcements filtered to the director/PDMR dealing categories. The headlines are consistent enough that you can key on them. Company investor-relations pages and the main London market news feeds both carry these.
- Parse the standardized fields and normalize buy versus sell, size in shares and in currency, and the reason code. Ignore anything flagged as an award, vesting, or scrip, because those are compensation events, not conviction trades. The signal you want is open-market purchases with the director's own money.
- Anchor every trade against the company's results calendar. Tag whether the dealing sits just after a closed period, mid-window, or unusually close to the next results date. A buy right after the window reopens is worth a second look.
- Weight by whether it is a first-time buyer or someone adding to an existing position, and by size relative to that person's known holdings and their salary. A chair putting in a year of net pay is louder than a director topping up by a rounding error.
- Cluster across people. One director buying is noise more often than not. Three or four PDMRs at the same issuer buying in the same window, right after results, is the pattern that has historically been worth reading.
The failure mode I would warn you about is treating every PDMR line as a trade. A large chunk of UK director dealing notifications are not discretionary buys at all. They are share awards vesting, options being exercised, dividend reinvestment, or the company itself buying back stock and reporting it under a related heading. If you count those as conviction signals, your screen will light up constantly and mean nothing. The reason code and transaction nature fields exist precisely so you can strip that stuff out, and the discipline of stripping it out is most of the work.
One more practical note. Because the closely-associated-person rule catches spouses and controlled entities, the name on the notification is not always the director. You will see filings under a person connected to the PDMR, and those count. Do not filter them out just because the name does not match the board list. That connected-party buy is often exactly the trade someone would rather you glossed over.
If you already have a Form 4 screen you trust, most of your logic ports over. Swap EDGAR for RNS, swap the two-day US clock for the tighter UK one, add the closed-period calendar as a context layer, and be ruthless about throwing out the compensation noise. The signal is there, it is just filed under a British acronym and wrapped in a results calendar the US regime never gave you.