IG Group Kicks Off £150M Buyback Program Spending £765K

IG Group (LON: IGG) bought back the first batch of its ordinary shares on Thursday, spending a total of £765,703, under the recently launched buyback program.

The retail broker purchased 100,372 ordinary shares for an average price of little more than 759 pence apiece. Transactions were carried out across three exchanges: London Stock Exchange, CHI-X Europe and BATS Europe.

All the shares were brought by JPMorgan Securities on behalf of the brokerage firms, which waived its authority to make decisions on the transactions.

The London-headquartered broker launched the buyback program with plans of repurchasing up to £150 million of its ordinary shares from the market, aiming to reduce its share capital.

It tapped the services of JPMorgan for repurchasing the first £75 million tranche of the buyback, which is scheduled to be completed by 21 January 2023. With another tranche of up to £75 million expected to be kicked off later, the broker is aiming to wrap the entire buyback program by the end of the financial year 2023.

Rallying Shares

The share buyback decision, along with strong financials for FY22, turned out to be an excellent decision for the broker. After the announcement of the decision on Thursday morning, prices of IG shares rallied more than 10.6 percent as of press time.

Along with IG, two other London-listed brokers are repurchasing their ordinary shares from the open market.

CMC Markets (LON: CMCX), which launched a £30 million buyback program, also brought back 64,000 ordinary shares on Thursday, spending £193,216. Plus500 (LON: PLUS), another retail broker which has been repurchasing shares for years now, bought back £546,169 worth of its shares on the same day. The Israeli broker launched a $50 million buyback program earlier in April, alongside an ongoing $55 million program, both of which will end by the end of 2022.