IG Group - History

History

The company was founded by Stuart Wheeler in 1974 as a spread betting business under the name IG Index (an abbreviation for Investors Gold Index). In 1982 it started to offer bets on FT 30 companies and in 1995 on all publicly-traded companies.

In July 2000, shares in the newly named IG Group plc were first listed on the London Stock Exchange.

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 Wheeler's shares, and those of certain other long-standing shareholders, in a management buy-out (backed by venture capitalists CVC Capital Partners Ltd) which valued the company at £143 million. IG Group plc's listing on the London Stock Exchange 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 acquired fxonline, a Japanese retail FX business.

IG Group has been trying to gain access to the potentially lucrative United States 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 spread bet product but which 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.

In June 2011 IG Markets shut down its traditional fixed-odds sports service extrabet, which had an emphasis on in-play betting. The fixed odds sport service was shut down to focus on financial wagers, after failing to find a buyer for the whole unit.