FTSE 100 financial technology stock London Stock Exchange Group (LSE: LSEG) has had a poor run over the last year due to the global software sell-off, falling about 15%. However, recently it’s come storming back from its lows – had an investor put £5,000 into the stock a month ago, it would now be worth about £5,800.
Can the stock continue to move higher? Let’s take a look at today’s (23 April) first-quarter trading update for clues.
Strong numbers and raised guidance
The Q1 update’s pretty good, in my view. Encouragingly, there’s no sign of a slowdown in the business. For the quarter, total income was up 9.8% year on year to a record £2,415m. Breaking this down, Data & Analytics grew 5.1%, FTSE Russell rose 8.8%, Risk Intelligence lifted 10.5%, and Markets were an impressive 15.5% higher.
Overall, its subscription businesses saw 6.3% year-on-year growth. That compares to 5.9% for 2025.
On the back of this performance, the company raised its guidance for 2026. It now expects organic constant currency growth in total income excluding recoveries to be in the upper half of its guidance range of 6.5%-7.5%
Management insights
For me, the commentary around the numbers was the most interesting part of the update. Here, CEO David Schwimmer said that as market participants consume growing volumes of data to make trading and risk management decisions, they’re increasingly turning to LSEG for its trusted solutions.
He added that the adoption of AI and agentic solutions is accentuating this. For accurate decision-making, access to deep, real-time data sets is critical.
“Our customers recognise that our solutions are more valuable in an AI world. With our unmatched data, infrastructure and partnerships, we are uniquely positioned to partner with customers to seize new growth opportunities.”
LSEG CEO David Schwimmer
Schwimmer also touched on the fact that LSEG has made its data available to licensed customers through a wide range of foundational models and cloud environments, including Anthropic, Microsoft, Open AI, Databricks, and Snowflake. In other words, it’s making its data available to more users.
He also noted that the company is making strong progress with its own AI tools. Currently, its Workspace AI Search tool is in pilot with a wider launch planned in the coming months while its Workspace AI Deep Research tool is now available through Microsoft Teams.
Is the stock cheap?
So, we have a blue-chip FinTech company that’s growing at a healthy rate and looks set to remain relevant in the AI era. How does it look from a valuation perspective though?
Well, in my view, it looks quite attractive. Plugging in earnings forecasts for this year and next, we have forward-looking price-to-earnings (P/E) ratios of 21 and 18.
Those multiples are above FTSE 100 averages. However, I believe they’re justified given the company’s level of growth. At those valuations, I reckon the stock has the potential to continue moving higher. So I think it’s worth a closer look today.
Of course, there are no guarantees it will continue to climb in the near term. A lot will depend on sentiment towards a) software stocks (amid AI disruption fears) and b) the market in general.
I’m backing the share price to go higher personally though. At present, this is one of my largest FTSE 100 holdings.
