IG Group talks to FinanceFeeds about yesterday’s equities rush

One thing that has become very certain among almost a year of total uncertainty is that a degree of much missed volatility has returned to the OTC derivatives markets.

Every time the mainstream news brings a potential change in circumstances to the public domain during these times of ever-increasing government control, loss of livelihood and fearmongering, almost every instrument from fiat currency to corporate stock moves significantly in price.

Yesterday was no exception, and in the wake of the absurd proffering by government puppets and tabloid newspapers across the United Kingdom that suddenly there is about to be a vaccination for an unproven virus which has been used as a tool for global governments to coerce billions of people out of their livelihoods and liberties, restrict movement, and crash entire national economies, news-based trading rocketed.

To be specific, interest in the trading of multinational pharmaceutical and chemical company Pfizer – the firm which claims it has a vaccination for COVID-19 – was so intense that many major electronic trading firms suffered outages.

This morning, following FinanceFeeds report on the matter, we spoke to IG Group’s senior management in London to gain internal perspective on the day’s events.

Rob Pike, Head of UK PCM at IG Group explained to FinanceFeeds today “Clients bought back into the stocks that bit them on the way down when COVID struck. Traders want to believe the positive vaccine news but still remain cautious. The fact we have seen such strong buying up towards the highs tells you that investors don’t want to miss any prolonged good news. The US led the way of course, FANG stocks are still well bid, but those stocks that performed well in the pre-pandemic world were back in fashion, certainly for today at least.”

“This incident meant a very small section of our clients intermittently experienced delays in charts and pricing but this did not affect the vast majority of our clients as we could see from their trading activity levels. To be clear our clients could trade at all times” confirmed IG Group’s management.

From FinanceFeeds research here in London, it appeared that in general, trading per minute yesterday in the 30 minutes after the Pfizer announcement versus before was up between 8 to 10 times at one point. This was unprecedented, this spike is higher than the volatility experienced in March but has come down now from that peak. Traders yesterday seem to have switched on the back of the announcements into stocks impacted by COVID, such as airlines and retailers.

Indeed, stocks of entire sectors are very much under the microscope right now, hence even more reason for brokers to expand their multi-asset mettle, especially if the current UK lockdown does not end until March, and further ones ensue given that Prime Minister Boris Johnson is hellbent on taking this line despite the dissent of almost his entire cabinet and much of the sensible and pragmatic British workforce.