IG Brand Guidelines: IG Index of 1974, Spread Betting & the tastytrade Years

A bet on the price of gold.

IG began in London in 1974 as IG Index, the letters standing for Investors Gold Index. Its founder was the financier Stuart Wheeler. According to English Wikipedia, the firm let clients speculate on the price of gold at a time when UK exchange controls restricted buying physical gold, and it was the first company to offer spread betting: a bet on the direction of a price, settled in cash, without owning the underlying asset.

The business widened from there. English Wikipedia says IG added spread betting on sporting events in 1993 and foreign-exchange trading in 1996. In July 2000 IG Group was formed as the parent company of IG Index, and its shares were listed on the London Stock Exchange. In 2003 Wheeler sold his stake and a management buyout backed by CVC Capital Partners took the company private; it returned to the stock market in April 2005.

International growth began in Australia in 2002, IG’s first move abroad. It entered the United States in 2007 by buying HedgeStreet, an online derivatives exchange later renamed Nadex, and Japan in September 2008 by buying the trading firm FXOnline. Its sports betting service, extrabet, closed in 2011, the year new leverage limits in Japan weighed on its results, English Wikipedia says. In March 2022 IG completed the sale of Nadex to the owner of Crypto.com.

Spread bets, CFDs and shares.

IG’s corporate website groups its products into three kinds: over-the-counter leveraged derivatives, sold as CFDs and, in the UK and Ireland, as spread bets; exchange-traded derivatives, offered in the United States under the tastytrade brand; and stock trading and investments. The company says it launched share dealing in the UK in 2014, and that IG Smart Portfolios, a managed service built on iShares ETFs, was launched with BlackRock in April 2017. The same site lists IG.com, tastytrade, IG Prime, Spectrum and DailyFX among its brands.

Regulation has shaped the range. In 2016 the UK Financial Conduct Authority announced new rules for the industry, and IG withdrew its binary options product early in 2017; from 2018 the European Securities and Markets Authority banned binary options for retail clients and limited leverage on CFDs, English Wikipedia says. IG’s UK businesses are regulated by the FCA, and the footer of its UK website names the separate companies behind the one brand: IG Markets for CFDs, IG Index for spread betting, IG Trading and Investments for share dealing and IG Digital Assets for cryptoassets.

Acquisitions brought new names into the group. IG bought the research site DailyFX from FXCM in 2016 and the Chicago broker tastytrade in January 2021; its US foreign-exchange arm, IG US, was renamed tastyfx in June 2024. IG agreed to buy the UK investing app Freetrade in January 2025 and completed the purchase on 1 April 2025, FinanceFeeds reported, with Freetrade keeping its own brand, platform and leadership. In September 2025 IG agreed to buy 70 per cent of the Australian crypto exchange Independent Reserve, a deal English Wikipedia says completed after regulatory approval in January 2026.

Sport has carried the name as well. IG sponsored the Harlequins rugby union club from 2013, became a partner of the England cricket team for 2021 and 2022, and in February 2024 signed a ten-year naming-rights agreement for the Aichi International Arena in Nagoya, named the IG Arena, according to English Wikipedia.

How online brokers present themselves.

Online brokers and trading platforms sell access to markets through a screen, so the screen does much of the branding. Their websites lead with app views and price charts, and many show the same platform on a phone, a tablet and a desktop. Saxo, for example, presents two platforms by name, SaxoInvestor for simple investing and SaxoTrader for its full range, rather than a single product.

The visual language is often restrained. Interfaces come in dark and light modes, numbers are set in clear sans-serif type, and green and blue accents mark rising prices, buttons and links. Wordmarks tend to be short and confident: a single word, two letters or a name with a number, written to sit comfortably in an app icon as well as on a sponsorship board or the name of an arena.

Regulation is part of the page design. Footers carry licence lines that name the regulated companies behind a brand and their supervisors, such as the Financial Conduct Authority in the UK or the Danish Financial Supervisory Authority, and pages for leveraged products carry risk warnings set near the top. IG’s UK website, for instance, names four separate companies behind the one brand in its footer.

Beyond trading, these brands publish a great deal. Product pages explain shares, ETFs, options and, in some markets, savings or pension accounts; education hubs and market commentary aim at newer investors; and listed or bank-owned groups add annual and investor reports and press releases. This guide looks at how each company’s name, ownership and history sit behind that common pattern.

A London group with many brands.

Today IG Group Holdings plc is headquartered in London and listed on the London Stock Exchange. English Wikipedia lists it in the FTSE 100, while the group’s own About page calls it a FTSE 250 company. Breon Corcoran became chief executive in December 2023, and Andrew Barron became chair on 1 April 2026 after approval from the Financial Conduct Authority. In November 2025 IG moved its financial year end from 31 May to 31 December.

In March 2026 IG began a strategic review. One outcome, announced on 30 July 2026, is the proposed purchase of Underdog, a US operator of daily fantasy sports and prediction markets. Pulse 2.0 reported on 31 July 2026 that completion was expected in late 2026 or early 2027, subject to US regulatory approvals, and that Underdog would run as a standalone business with its own brand and management team. The deal was agreed in July 2026 and had not completed at the time of writing.

IG has also faced legal and regulatory scrutiny. After the Swiss National Bank removed its cap on the franc in January 2015, the UK Financial Ombudsman Service ordered IG in June 2015 to compensate affected customers. In Australia, class actions were filed against IG Markets in 2023 over the promotion of CFDs and binary options, and in November 2025 the Supreme Court of Western Australia ruled that a “manifest error” clause in IG’s client contract was unfair and void under Australian consumer law, English Wikipedia says.

For a design guide, IG shows how a two-letter name taken from a 1974 gold index can stay at the front while the group adds brands such as tastytrade and Freetrade beneath it. Compare Plus500, another CFD provider in this series, and Trading 212. For this guide we use ledger charcoal, an index red and a muted gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep IG’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.