How to track director dealings in the UK
How to track UK director dealings via FCA NSM, LSE RNS, or an aggregator — three routes compared, with the filters that separate signal from noise.
Three ways to track UK directors' dealings, in order of pain: directly off the FCA's portal, via RNS feeds, or through an aggregator. This guide walks through all three honestly.
Route 1: the FCA National Storage Mechanism. The NSM portal is the authoritative UK record. Every PDMR notification ends up here. Practical limitations: there's no public API, the portal is Cloudflare-protected against scraping, search is by issuer name or document type rather than by transaction date, and downloads are PDFs rather than structured data. Workflow: search for the issuer, filter document type to *Director / PDMR Shareholding*, open each PDF, transcribe the fields manually. Workable for following 1–2 companies; impractical for systematic monitoring.
Route 2: the LSE Regulatory News Service. Every UK-listed issuer publishes PDMR notifications through RNS under category code DSH. The LSE's news page lets you filter announcements by category, so a DSH-only filter gives you a chronological feed of every directors' dealing across the LSE Main Market and AIM. Limitations: no historic search beyond a few weeks on the free interface, no structured-data export, and the licensed real-time RNS feed costs several thousand pounds a year. Good for ad-hoc lookups, not for a long-running monitoring setup.
Route 3: aggregators. Several services collect, normalise and serve UK directors' dealings as a structured feed — some UK-only, some pan-European. Trade-offs vary: latency (some are real-time, some daily), data quality (some only catch headline numbers, some parse the full notification), and how cleanly they tie filings back to the underlying insider's track record over time.
InsideREU coverage status. UK is live — we ingest PDMR notifications from RNS (category DSH) and Investegate several times a day, alongside Germany (BaFin), Sweden (Finansinspektionen), Switzerland (SIX), the seven Euronext markets (France, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Norway), Spain (CNMV) and Australia (ASX). Route 3 above — an aggregator — is exactly what InsideREU is for the UK: no NSM Cloudflare wall, no licensed RNS feed cost, just a structured feed on the /director-dealings hub alongside the rest of Europe.
What to filter for once you have the data. Raw filings aren't the signal — they're the noise. Three filters meaningfully separate signal from chatter:
1. Buys, not sells. Sales have many non-directional motivations: tax bills, diversification, option-vesting schedules, divorce settlements. Voluntary open-market purchases are the cleaner signal. Discard anything tagged as an option exercise, a vesting event, a gift, or a sale.
2. Material size relative to the insider. A £10k buy by a CEO earning £3m a year is rounding error. A £500k buy by the same CEO is conviction. Where you can, normalise transaction value against the insider's annual compensation or known holdings.
3. Cluster behaviour. One insider buying could be opportunistic. Three insiders at the same company buying in the same week is rarely random. Studies of US data show cluster buys outperform isolated buys by 1.5–2x on 3-month forward returns. See our guide on cluster buys for what to watch for and the confounders to filter out (rights issues, mandated holdings, coordinated RSU vesting).
Signal interpretation, briefly. The academic backing for insider purchases as a predictive signal is well-established — Lakonishok & Lee (2001) found 4–6% per-year excess returns in the US, and Cohen, Malloy & Pomorski (2012) showed the signal concentrates in a subset of "opportunistic" insiders rather than spreading evenly. UK-specific replications are sparser but broadly consistent. For the full research summary see how insider buys predict returns.
Bottom line. If you're tracking 1–2 specific UK companies, NSM + RNS by hand is fine. If you're trying to monitor directors' dealings across the LSE, AIM and the broader European market as a unified feed, you need an aggregator. The InsideREU director dealings hub is the live entry point — UK included, alongside the rest of Europe.