Plus500 down on trading volatility

The price of shares in FTSE 250 contracts-for-difference specialist Plus500 (LON:PLUS) dropped by 7.87% to 1,118.50p (as of 12:55 BST) after posting a trading update. The company said that trading has remained highly volatile during recent weeks and customer trading performance has outperformed expectations leading to lower than expected total revenues for Q2 to date. Management said that they expect performance to be neutral over time and that this is not significant in terms of long-term revenues.

Interim CEO David Zruia commented: “We are pleased the business has continued to generate record levels of Customer Income, added over 100,000 new customers so far in Q2 and has materially grown the net client deposits balance to almost half a billion dollars.

“We have consistently stated that Customer Trading Performance 2 is subject to significant market movements and is therefore likely to fluctuate. This is magnified during periods of heightened market volatility such as those we are currently experiencing and given the growing scale of the business. Nonetheless we continue to expect this performance to revert to a medium-term historic level of near zero and our outlook for the year remains unchanged“.