For many clients of IG.com, their best trade the past year would probably have been buying up shares of….. IG!
LeapRate Exclusive… Leading UK spreadbetting and forex broker IG Group has seen investors bid up its shares in the past few weeks, sending IG.com shares to their highest level ever. At its current share price of £6.46, IG’s market value (LON:IGG) is now £2.4 billion (or $4 billion).
The rise in IG’s share price has been fairly steady over the past five years (see chart below), mainly in response to consistently improving results. No financial news has come out since IG reported Q2-2014 results on January 14 (IG has a May year end), so the past month’s activity has been mainly a response to growing industry volumes and an anticipation of IG’s next earnings results report being good.
IG Group share price chart, past 5 years. Source: Google Finance.
So far, IG’s makeover during the past year seems like quite a success, at least as far as its share price is concerned. IG.com spent several million dollars to buy the IG.com domain name, and subsequently rebranded all its various businesses under the IG.com umbrella. IG has also seen some turnover in senior management, with longtime Chief Market Strategist David Jones and IG’s Head of UK and former MD of IG Index Tim Hughes leaving the company.
While IG is clearly leading the publicly-traded online brokerage pack in share price performance, it is not alone. UK CFD broker Plus500 has seen its shares triple since going public last July, its market cap now sits at about $500 million. In the US, FXCM and Gain Capital shares are both well ahead of where they were this time last year, but are down from all time highs hit in the Fall.
For more on the global Forex industry see the LeapRate-Dow Jones Forex Industry Report.