IG Group
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| Public Limited Company | |
| Traded as | : |
| Industry | Financial Services |
| Founded | 1974 |
| Headquarters | London, UK |
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Key people
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Andy Green, (Chairman) Peter Hetherington, (CEO) |
| Services | Online Forex trading, CFDs, spread betting, shares trading |
| Revenue | £427.0 million (2015) |
| £169.6 million (2015) | |
| £131.9 million (2015) | |
| Subsidiaries |
Nadex DailyFX |
| Website |
www |
IG Group is a UK-based company providing trading in financial derivatives such as contracts for difference and financial spread betting and, as of 2014, stockbroking to retail traders. While the majority of the company's activities are based in the UK, the company has expanded internationally. It is listed on the and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
The company was founded in 1974 by Stuart Wheeler as a spread betting business under the name IG Index (an abbreviation for Investors Gold Index) which allowed people to trade gold prices as an index instead of buying the physical commodity. In July 2000, shares in the newly named IG Group plc were first listed on the .
In July 2002, IG Group commenced trading in Australia after a change in the country's financial services legislation made it possible to offer Contracts for Difference to Australian residents.
IG Group took the opportunity to acquire its founder's shares, and those of certain other long-standing shareholders, in a management buy-out (backed by private equity firm CVC Capital Partners) which valued the company at £143 million; IG Group plc's listing on the was subsequently cancelled on 7 November 2003.
In May 2005, after two years of private ownership, IG Group and CVC Capital Partners re-floated the company on the main list of the London Stock Exchange with a valuation of £393 million.
In October 2008, IG Group acquired fxonline, a Japanese retail FX business.
IG Group has been trying to gain access to the potentially lucrative US market where IG Group's main products, contracts for difference and financial spread betting, are currently not legal. In 2007, it purchased HedgeStreet, a small US based company that developed an electronic marketplace that allows online retail investors to trade financial derivatives. It renamed this the North American Derivatives Exchange or (NADEX) and has been attempting to use this to develop a product that looks like its binary option product but that meets the US financial regulations and can be offered to retail traders. In May 2010, it obtained permission from the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission to make various technical changes that move in that direction.
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Wikipedia