Peter Cruddas (a Tory peer) is considering splitting his online trading platform in two.
CMC Markets will be undergoing the most significant shake-up in its history since 1989’s founding. It is evaluating whether or not to split its online trading group into a retail-oriented platform and a leveraged one, giving customers spread betting options that are more risky.
Leveraged financial betting is the most popular way for the company to make its profits.

Peer: CMC Markets (pictured), an online trading platform for trading, was established by Tory peer Peter Cruddas. The company is currently evaluating whether it should be split into both a retail-oriented trading platform as well as a leveraged business.
Cruddas is a City grandiose who has worked hard in recent months for the expansion of its retail business. Retail tends not to be subject to market volatility or regulators.
CMC revealed plans in June for a wealth platform that will let customers manage ISAs, as well as their own self-invested individual pensions.
CMC would be in direct competition for its listed competitors Hargreaves Lansdown and AJ Bell.
The company also struck a deal in September to take over 500,000 investing clients from Australian banking giant ANZ with combined assets worth around £25billion.
CMC’s board said on Monday that it was in the ‘very early stages’ of an ‘exploratory review’ around whether to divide the business.
It is anticipated that the review will start before the year ends and end by June next year.
Following speculation that the company might split, the admission was made. After the news, shares increased by 6.4 percentage points, or 16.5p.
A division could be lucrative for Cruddas, 68, who aside from being CMC’s chief executive is its largest shareholder with a stake of just over 56 per cent. Fiona, Cruddas’ wife, has a 3.1% share in the group.
CMC witnessed its business boom in lockdown, as investors who were not wealthy enough to leave their home and invest in volatile markets saw the opportunity.
The company did warn in September that trading activity was slowing down due to Covid lockdown restrictions. As a result, full-year revenue would be lower than expected.
Since the warning, CMC Markets’s shares have lost around 34 per cent of their value, wiping over £240million off Cruddas’s personal fortune.
The billionaire baron, who also formerly served as co-treasurer of the Conservative Party, attracted controversy last year when he was elevated to the House of Lords by Boris Johnson despite objections by an independent commission due to his involvement in a ‘cash for access’ scandal in 2012 involving then prime minister David Cameron.