IG Index is the largest and longest-running spread betting firm, established since 1974, and offering prices in a huge range of indices, currencies, commodities and options, as well as thousands of individual shares.
IG Index, the original IG Group company, was founded by Stuart Wheeler in 1974. 'IG' originally stood for 'Investors Gold' (this was because IG Index catered to people who wanted to speculate on the gold price but for whom it was difficult to do so because of exchange controls). 'Index' refers to the underlying index upon whose movement the customer speculates (the original index being the price of gold). Eight years later, IG became the first company to offer spread bets on the FT30, which was the major index at the time before the creation of the FTSE 100 in 1984 and in 1995 IG Index was the first to offer bets on individual shares on all publicly quoted firms. In 2000 IG Group was floated on the London Stock Exchange. In 2003 the group was de-listed following a management buyout led by Nat le Roux, the current CEO, and backed by CVC Capital Partners. In May 2005, IG Group Holdings plc was floated on the main list of the London Stock Exchange. Since then it has been promoted to become a member of the FTSE 250 and currently has a market capitalisation of around £1.5 billion with offices in 11 countries.
The business is a spread betting operation that allows its clients to bet on a large range of financial markets, including stock indices, shares, currencies and commodities, and sporting events. IG Index claims to be the world's leading online and offline spread betting firm by both profitability and turnover. The spread betting side of the company is pretty innovative (being one of the first to offer 'binary bets' on a lot of financial markets), and the dealing platform gets updated quite regularly. The Company was the first to offer bets on the FT30 in 1982, the first to offer spread bets on individual shares in 1995 and the first in the UK to offer an online dealing platform.
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IG Index is a long established company listed on the London Stock Exchange (as IG Group Holdings plc, IGG.L), valued at about £1.5bn and are the 167th largest listed company in the UK. IG has offices in several European countries apart from the UK including Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore and Japan. The group now (November 2014) services clients in 16 markets, has about 125,000 clients each month and offers around 10,000 markets to deal on. Less than 1% of the 5 million trades IG processes are executed by phone these days although a third are done via smartphones and tablet apps.
At present IGIndex enjoys an extremely healthy financial position; as at 30 November 2007, on the latest published balance sheet IG Group had total assets of £833 million, no debt and own cash of £109 million. IG claims that 50% of all UK spread betters use it as their primary or secondary spread betting provider of choice [April 2010].
IG Index and IG Markets are authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority (FSA). IG Markets is a member of the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The Group's Australian operations are regulated by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).
Verdict: IG Index are fine (at least for modest size, even if not the best spreads), one of the best spread betting platforms with excellent charts (I notice in IG's annual accounts that they spend an absolute fortune on new IT equipment and support) and the fact that they make some 100 Million $ net profit annually means that they can handle big winnings and big size traders.
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