Article 19 of the Market Abuse Regulation is the provision that turns a director's share purchase into a public announcement. It requires a PDMR, and anyone closely associated with them, to notify both the company and the regulator of transactions in the company's shares or debt instruments, and requires the company to make that notification public.
The deadline is short by design — a matter of business days, not weeks — because a disclosure regime that lagged the market would tell you only what used to be true. Speed is the point: the announcement is meant to reach the market while it still describes the current position.
There is a de minimis threshold. Below a modest annual total, transactions don't have to be notified at all, which is why you rarely see very small purchases in the record. National regulators have discretion to raise that threshold, so the exact figure depends on the jurisdiction.
Article 19 also contains the closed-period rule, which bars PDMRs from dealing in the run-up to results. That restriction is the reason insider buying arrives in bursts rather than evenly through the year.
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Information only, not investment advice.