Here’s a rarity: a constituent of the financial services sector reporting record trading - but IG Group, the £1.1 billion spread-betting specialist, appears to have a momentum all of its own. Yesterday’s first-quarter update shows revenues rising an above-forecast 29 per cent to £53 million, with the number of new accounts opened up by 45 per cent on the year. Further, IG’s overseas operations - it has set up shop in France, Spain and the United States in the past year - continue to grow vigorously: revenues from outside the UK account for 30 per cent of the total, against 22 per cent this time last year.

The greater encouragement was that the tick-up in costs that marred its second-half numbers (IG’s financial year runs to May 31) seems to have been an aberration. One of these - the amount of betting duty that IG pays to HM Revenue & Customs - is outside the company’s control (a reflection of its clients’ losses), but its return to more usual levels is welcome, all the same. Even more so is the fall-off in a cost that IG can influence: bad debts. These dropped from more than 3 per cent of sales to less than 2 per cent in the three months to August 31.

The bigger issue is for how long IG can keep growing in what remains a bear market for many of the assets on which its clients bet. The assumption must be that, much like a private-client stockbroker, its customers become so worn down by volatility that, at some point, they begin to trade less frequently, or cease trading altogether. The profile of IG’s average customer - a non-City-based male with savings of between £10,000 and £50,000 and an account balance of £500 - indicates that they might prove relatively immune to economic stress. So, too, does the fact that most trade to generate additional income rather than as a leisure activity.

More certain is IG’s scope to keep growing overseas. Revenues from Singapore, for example, have trebled year on year. In France and Spain it is generating monthly sales of more than £500,000 in each country, from a standing start - an indication of a pent-up appetite for a product that has become better understood and of which IG is one of only two providers with global reach (CMC being the other). That experience augurs well for IG’s opening of a direct presence in Italy next month.

At 345p, up 12½p, IG trades at less than 14 times current-year earnings - near the bottom of the range it has traded since rejoining the stock market three years ago. Hold on.

Galiform

Shareholders could have been excused for thinking that when Galiform offloaded MFI, its struggling furniture chain, for £1 two years ago, that would have been the end of its flat-pack misfortunes.

However, the two sides have been quarrelling ever since and the row (over the value of assets transferred to MFI’s balance sheet at the time of the sale) has been yet another reason to avoid the shares. That is exactly what investors have done: Galiform has fallen nearly 80 per cent in the space of a year.

Merchant Equity Partners, MFI’s owner, had argued that it was owed £53 million, covering 88 disputed assets. Galiform contested the claim and yesterday the two sides avoided a costly court case and settled - at £8 million.

However, to suggest that this truce might prove a turning point seems premature. Galiform is still exposed to MFI through a financial distress clause. If the chain collapses, 46 store leases - with annual rent obligations of more than £15 million and rates of about £6 million - revert back to their former owner. Meanwhile, the conditions that lay behind Galiform’s poor first-half figures in July - which prompted profit forecasts to be cut by 9 per cent - appear to have worsened. Only 20 per cent of the sales of Galiform’s Howden Joinery unit might be considered defensive - those to local authorities and housing associations.

At 31½p, or less than four times current-year earnings, and a recently restored dividend providing a prospective yield of 5 per cent, the shares appear temptingly cheap. However, that would be to ignore forecast year-end net debt of £60 million and the danger of further downgrades at November’s third-quarter trading update. Avoid.

Abcam

Abcam might best be considered an Asos for antibodies: a catalogue retailer whose online approach has transformed the profitability of its sector. Rather than clothes and fashion accessories, this Cambridge-based company sells proteins to research scientists engaged in drug discovery. But like Asos, it has enjoyed a stellar share price performance: up threefold since floating on AIM three years ago. Yesterday’s full-year figures fuelled the latest advance. They showed sales up 50 per cent to £37 million - an acceleration on the pace of Abcam’s two previous years as a public company. Profits, something of a rarity in the life sciences sector, rose even faster: earnings per share increased 44 per cent.

Abcam’s strength has been to tap into massive demand for antibodies since the decoding of the human genome at the turn of the decade. Its innovation has been to eschew print catalogues in favour of the internet, where coupling its products with extensive scientific data that would be too copious to print has enabled it to charge a premium. It now has the world’s biggest catalogue of antibodies (some 45,000), whose recent expansion should underpin near-term revenues. Three quarters of its sales are to government-funded bodies, while the increase in the volume of antibodies it makes itself - rather than resells on behalf of 250 suppliers - should underpin margins.

However, at 492½p, up 36½p, or 22 times earnings, there will be better times to buy.

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