By Ben Dummett and Joe Wallace

Activist investor Elliott Investment Management has taken a stake in the London Stock Exchange Group, according to people familiar with the matter, and is likely to push for increased stock buybacks and action to lift profit margins.

The hedge-fund firm is making a somewhat contrarian bet. LSEG stock is down 35% over the past year, amid mounting investor concerns that new artificial-intelligence tools will reduce the need for financial data and analytics that the company and others offer.

Activist investors often prod companies to spin off businesses to generate value. However, Elliott isn't pursuing that strategy here, said one of the people. Instead, it wants LSEG to consider launching a new multibillion-pound share buyback and lift margins toward those of rivals.

LSEG, a big financial-data provider and exchange operator, competes with peers such as S&P Global and Intercontinental Exchange, the owner of the New York Stock Exchange. It recently bought back 1 billion pounds, or some $1.37 billion, of stock.

As of Tuesday's close, it had a market value of about $51 billion. Shares in LSEG rose about 1.4% by late morning in London on Wednesday.

The Financial Times first reported Elliott's stake in LSEG. The size of the stake held by Elliott, which counts energy major BP as another recent U.K target, couldn't be learned.

Elliott's intervention follows decades of dealmaking and investor agitation involving LSEG, including failed tie-ups with exchange operators in Canada, Germany and Hong Kong, and the purchase of Bloomberg competitor Refinitiv. In 2017, it tussled about management succession with activist investor Christopher Hohn's TCI Fund Management.

Since the startup Anthropic launched Claude for Financial Services last summer, "LSEG shares have been a lightning rod for market fears about AI disruption risk," Jefferies analyst Tom Mills wrote in a note last week.

The big concern for investors, Mills said, is that AI platforms displace LSEG's desktop terminals. Traders, bankers and investors use these to execute trades, contact each other and review data, news and analysis.

LSEG's revenue totaled GBP2.2 billion in the third quarter of last year. Sales of data, analytics and terminals were the biggest contributor, accounting for 44%.

Concerns intensified last week after Anthropic released new legal tools for its Claude Cowork assistant, hitting shares in LSEG and other data companies.

LSEG and its peers argue those worries are unfounded. They contend that AI will increase the value of their services, making it easier to extract business insights and trading opportunities from raw data. Companies with proprietary data feeds say even AI tools must buy the underlying information they provide to track the markets.

"AI cannot replicate or replace our real-time data," LSEG Chief Executive David Schwimmer said in October.

That same month, LSEG signed a licensing deal giving Claude users access to its financial data. Another partnership incorporates its data into Microsoft's 365 Copilot and agentic AI tools.

Write to Ben Dummett at ben.dummett@wsj.com and Joe Wallace at joe.wallace@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

February 11, 2026 07:48 ET (12:48 GMT)

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