London, March 20, 2026, 22:28 (GMT)
- Legal & General closed at 236.3p on Friday, down about 2.1%, while the FTSE 100 lost 1.4%. 1
- The stock sits about 15.5% below its Feb. 23 high, extending weakness after last week’s miss on profit and solvency measures despite a record £1.2 billion buyback. 2
- Markets have swung from rate-cut bets to pricing possible Bank of England hikes as war-driven energy prices revive inflation fears. 3
Legal & General Group Plc shares closed at 236.3 pence in London on Friday, down about 2.1% from Thursday and underperforming a 1.4% fall in the FTSE 100, as UK equities logged a third straight weekly decline. The move left the insurer and asset manager roughly 15.5% below its Feb. 23 peak of 279.5p. 1
That matters now because the stock is still absorbing last week’s results shock. On March 11, investors drove the shares sharply lower after L&G missed expectations on key earnings and capital measures even as it unveiled its biggest-ever buyback, and Friday’s broader selloff came with a UK market that is suddenly bracing for higher rates, not cuts. 4
L&G said 2025 core operating profit rose 6% to 1.623 billion pounds and core earnings per share climbed 9%, but its pro forma Solvency II coverage ratio fell to 210% from 232%. Solvency II is the capital test regulators use to judge how much financial cushion an insurer has against its obligations. Chief Executive António Simões said he was “very comfortable” with the ratio and that the group would return 2.4 billion pounds to investors over the next year. 5
L&G has already started the buyback. The company said the first tranche of the 1.2 billion-pound programme, worth up to 600 million pounds, began on March 12, and a filing on March 16 showed it had already repurchased 2.99 million shares for cancellation over the first two trading days. 6
A separate regulatory filing on Friday showed Simões’s recruitment award had vested, with 120,226 shares sold at 2.397203 pounds each to meet tax and national insurance liabilities, while 134,883 shares were retained. The filing added another company disclosure after a week dominated by the post-results selloff. 7
The pressure on L&G is awkward because peers have given investors cleaner capital-return stories. Aviva this month reported a 25% jump in annual profit and restarted a 350 million-pound buyback, while M&G reported flat profit but improving flows. Since Simões took over at the start of 2024, L&G’s shares have been broadly flat, compared with gains of about 44% for Aviva and 34% for the FTSE 100. 8
Matt Britzman, senior equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the day-of-results selloff looked “a little harsh” and that he remained “constructive about the path forward” as management simplifies the group. Even so, investors have stayed focused on the earnings miss and the weaker solvency reading, which dulled the impact of the buyback. 9
But the risk is plain. If oil stays high and the Bank of England keeps tilting hawkish, the appeal of L&G’s buyback and dividend may not be enough to offset doubts about capital strength and demand in its core pension-risk transfer, or bulk annuity, business — deals in which companies hand final-salary pension liabilities to insurers. Traders now see roughly a 70% chance of a quarter-point BoE hike by April and up to three moves by year-end, while Standard Life’s results earlier this week showed how quickly investors punish any sign that bulk annuity volumes could cool. AJ Bell’s Danni Hewson said the geopolitical shock risked “another inflation burn” for households.
