For the past year IG Group has been rebranding its businesses under the generic ‘IG’ name.

LeapRate has learned that leading UK online brokerage and spreadbetting firm IG Group has spent millions of dollars acquiring the IG.com domain name. IG Group management apparently plan to consolidate all of IG’s various brands and businesses, such as IG Index and IG Markets, under the IG.com umbrella in the near future.

IG.com was previously the home of Brazil’s third-largest search portal. There’s already a rudimentary IG Group website up at www.ig.com.

So how much is a website domain such as IG.com go for nowadays? The IG.com domain was acquired on behalf of IG by domain name management specialist NetNames, which modestly claimed that they negotiated a 50% reduction in price on behalf of IG. While they didn’t divulge the exact purchase price (nor the fee paid to NetNames), NetNames did report that this was the second largest ever sale of a two-letter domain. The largest ever two-letter domain name sale? YP.com, which went for $3.85 million in 2008 to AT&T, looking at the time to boost its Yellow Pages brand. That should give our readers an idea of the order of magnitude involved here with IG.com.

By comparison (and to satisfy curiosity), the largest-ever domain name sale was Insure.com, bought for $16 million in 2009 by QuinStreet, which today operates Insure.com as a consumer insurance information portal. In the FX arena, FX portal ForexPros bought the Investing.com domain last year for a reported $2.45 million.

For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.