MAR Surveillance for Trading Firms

What you will learn

Market abuse surveillance is not optional — it is an active obligation under MAR, with AFM enforcement actions increasing each year. Yet many trading firms still rely on generic alert settings and undocumented escalation procedures. This workshop gives your team the practical skills to recognise suspicious patterns, calibrate alerts to your specific order flow, and handle the full STOR process confidently.

Every exercise uses realistic trading scenarios drawn from published AFM and ESMA enforcement cases, so your team practises on patterns that actually matter.

Programme

• MAR scope and obligations — Which instruments and behaviours fall under MAR, the interaction with MiFID II/MiFIR, and your firm's specific obligations based on licence type and activity
• Suspicious pattern recognition — Identifying spoofing, layering, front-running, wash trading, and ramping in real order book data with worked examples
• STOR procedure — When and how to file a Suspicious Transaction and Order Report, documentation requirements, AFM expectations, and common mistakes that lead to feedback
• Insider list management — Setting up and maintaining compliant insider lists, the permanent vs. event-based distinction, and practical tooling for tracking access to inside information
• Personal dealing policies — Designing PDMR and employee trading policies, pre-clearance procedures, and closed period management
• Kill switch governance — Circuit breakers, halt procedures, and the operational framework for stopping trading activity when market integrity is at risk

Who should attend

Approach

Before the workshop, we conduct an intake call to understand your firm's trading activity, current surveillance setup, and any recurring issues with alert calibration or AFM interactions. The exercises are then tailored to your specific instrument types and order flow patterns.

The format is hands-on: participants work through real enforcement case studies, practise STOR documentation on realistic scenarios, and review their own insider list management process against regulatory requirements. This is not a compliance theory session — it is a working session.

After the workshop

Your team receives all case study materials, the STOR templates and procedures document, the insider list management tool, and the alert calibration guide. For two weeks after the workshop, you can reach out with questions about your actual surveillance setup and MAR procedures.