For a lot of companies which have been reporting their financial results as of late, there is a lot more focus on what they have to say about the immediate present and future than about the past – now that we are obviously in a very new Coronavirus-affected world.

While a company’s current financial position is certainly important, especially when it comes to how well capitalized it is in view of the new economic reality we are all facing, how the company is faring in the “new world” is equally if not more important.

Which brings us to the case of leading online broker IG Group Holdings plc (LON:IGG).

IG Group reported its 2020 fiscal Q3 results earlier this week (IG has a May 31 fiscal year end), which had some fairly good news attached. You see, it looks like retail online brokerage and market making – of which IG is one if the largest worldwide – is one of those rare industries benefiting from the current “situation” of heightened market volatility.

IG reported a 29% rise in Q3 revenues (running to the end of February 2020) versus last year Q3. In fact, Q3-2020 was IG’s strongest revenue quarter since the implementation of ESMA’s product intervention measures in August 2018 which (among other things) severely limited the leverage with which clients can trade, harming broker volume and revenue figures in the process. Q3-2020 was indeed the third highest quarterly revenue in the IG’s history, exceeded only by the last two quarters of FY18.

For more on IG’s actual revenues and other financial results for Q3-2020 and the first nine months of its fiscal year we’ll refer you to IG’s press release on the matter. But what really caught our eye was what IG had to say about the beginning of fiscal Q4 – that is, the first few weeks of March.

It seems as though in the first 12 trading days in March IG saw revenues of about £52 million – interpolating to a full quarter at that rate would mean Q4 revenues of £264 million. That’s nearly double the fairly decent £139.8 million IG saw in the just-completed Q3.

IG did take to saying that these are “extraordinary times”, and that the sustained level of volatility (and revenues) seen over the past few weeks are unprecedented, and might not be expected to continue over a full quarter.