LONDON, March 18, 2026, 13:48 GMT
Barclays PLC shares rose about 1.6% in London trade on Wednesday, lifting the stock to around 400 pence and putting it among the FTSE 100’s stronger risers. The move followed a 1.44% gain in Tuesday’s session, when Barclays also beat the broader market. 1
The gain matters because investors are repricing where UK and U.S. interest rates go next. Global markets steadied as oil pulled back and traders waited for the Federal Reserve, while J.P. Morgan said the Bank of England’s next rate cut might not come until the first quarter of 2027. 2
That shift has run straight into bank stocks. UK financials rose 1.9% on Wednesday after banks had already helped lift the FTSE 100 on Tuesday, when the sector gained 1.3%. 3
Barclays also looks less exposed than some European rivals to the immediate Middle East shock. J.P. Morgan said HSBC and Standard Chartered were the most exposed among major European banks, while Barclays and several other lenders had less than 1% exposure on both revenue and profit measures. 4
But the trade can still go wrong. S&P Global said this week UK consumer sentiment fell to its lowest since January 2025, and economist Maryam Baluch called it one of the “first tangible signs” that the conflict was starting to hit the domestic economy. 5
Barclays has another prop under the shares: capital returns. The bank said on Feb. 10 that 2025 pretax profit rose 12% to 9.1 billion pounds, lifted its return-on-tangible-equity target — a key profitability measure — to more than 14% by 2028, and said it planned to return more than 15 billion pounds of capital to shareholders over 2026-2028. 6
That includes a 1 billion pound buyback. Barclays’ investor relations site says the programme announced on Feb. 10 was due to start in the first quarter, and a company announcement published two days ago said the bank had bought back 2,992,834 ordinary shares between March 12 and March 13. 7
Economists have grown more cautious as energy prices remake the policy backdrop. Dani Stoilova at BNP Paribas Markets 360 said the path to another Bank of England cut was “narrower and narrower by the day,” while Paul Dales of Capital Economics said policymakers were likely to “play for time.” 8
Flows may be helping, too. Goldman Sachs said hedge funds had “aggressively shorted” financial stocks in the week to March 13, and Erlen Capital Management’s Bruno Schneller said banks had become “liquid proxies” for hedging broader credit risk. 9
In New York, Barclays’ American depositary receipts, the U.S.-traded line of the stock, were up 1.6% at $21.14 by 13:19 UTC, echoing the move in London.
