IG Group May Quit London for New York — And It’s a Much Bigger Problem Than It Looks

Quick Answer: FTSE 250 trading platform IG Group has launched a strategic review that includes assessing whether to move its stock market listing from London to New York. The company, which is due to join the FTSE 100 on Monday, reported a 15% rise in profit before tax for 2025 and launched a £125 million share buyback, but investors are now focused on whether it will become the latest in a string of high-profile London departures.

IG Group has spent fifty years growing from a £30,000 spread betting operation into a £1.12 billion revenue business poised to enter the FTSE 100. Now it is considering whether London is still the right place to be listed at all.

The company announced on Thursday that it would conduct a strategic review examining its “domicile and listing venues” — corporate shorthand for a potential move to New York. Shares jumped 6% on the news, a reaction that tells its own story: investors welcomed the possibility of a US listing more than they were concerned by what it says about London’s standing as a financial centre.

Another One Considering the Exit

IG Group would not be leaving in isolation. It would be joining a queue. Just Eat delisted from the LSE in 2024. Flutter followed. Wise announced in 2025 that it would shift its primary listing from London to New York. Earlier this week, building materials group CRH ditched the LSE entirely, two and a half years after moving its primary listing to the US. The pattern is consistent and the direction of travel is unmistakable.

The reasons are structural. US markets offer deeper liquidity, higher valuations for growth businesses, and access to a far larger pool of institutional and retail capital. For a company like IG — which offers spread betting, forex trading and investing services and is explicitly looking to expand into the lucrative US online trading market — a New York listing is not just a financial decision. It is a strategic one. Being listed where your customers and competitors are has a logic that is difficult to argue against.

The irony is that IG’s underlying business is performing well. Revenues rose 7% in 2025 to £1.12 billion. Profit before tax climbed 15%. Active customers grew from 266,000 to 280,000. The share price has gained around 50% over the past year. This is not a distressed company seeking a lifeline — it is a strong business asking whether it could be valued even more highly elsewhere.

What This Means for London

The LSE’s problem is not that individual companies are making rational decisions. It is that the accumulation of those rational decisions is creating a self-reinforcing dynamic. Each departure reduces the index’s depth and diversity, which reduces its attractiveness to global investors, which reduces valuations for remaining companies, which gives the next company more reason to consider leaving.

The Revolut IPO decision — widely watched as a test of whether London can still attract major listings — takes on added significance in this context. If Revolut chooses London for its £60 billion float it would be a meaningful counterweight to the exodus narrative. If it doesn’t, the narrative hardens further.

The UK government and the FCA have introduced a series of reforms to listing rules in recent years, attempting to make London more competitive with New York and Amsterdam. The EU’s own capital markets integration push adds a further competitive dimension, with European exchanges also competing for listings that might otherwise default to New York.

IG Group says the outcome of its strategic review will be announced later this year. The company was founded in 1974 to let British investors bet on gold prices at a time when owning physical gold was restricted. It has survived and grown through every market cycle since. Whether it decides London is still the right home — or whether it joins the growing list of companies that have decided it isn’t — will be watched closely by every boardroom with a similar question on its agenda.

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