Market Live Email
Standard Life to buy Aegon UK for £2bn, Barratt Redrow reiterates guidance
By Michele Maatouk
Date: Wednesday 15 Apr 2026
(Sharecast News) - London open
The FTSE 100 was called to open around five points lower.
Stocks to watch
Standard Life said it has agreed to buy Aegon UK for £2bn. The deal includes the UK insurance and pensions operations of Aegon Europe and the price comprises £750m in cash and 181.1m newly issued shares in Standard Life. Standard Life said the acquisition will create the UK's largest retirements and savings and income business. The combined group will have 16m customers and assets under administration of around £480bn.
Gambling operator Rank said it expected full-year operating profit of at least £68m after a 5% jump in third-quarter net gaming revenue. The owner of Mecca bingo and Grosvenor casinos said NGR for the three months to March came in at £205.4m, with year-to-date NGR up 6% on the prior year.
Barratt Redrow reiterated guidance but warned that war in the Middle East was making visibility beyond the current year more uncertain. Updating on trading, the homebuilder said the third quarter had been "solid", leaving it on track to deliver total of home completions of between 17,200 and 17,800 in the current year. It also expects to deliver adjusted pre-tax profits in line with consensus. But the blue chip also flagged that visibility beyond the current year "remains more uncertain", as economic tensions spike in response to war in the Middle East.
Newspaper round-up
Lidl and Iceland have become the first companies to have ads banned after the introduction of rules cracking down on the marketing of junk food in the UK. The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been policing the ban on ads featuring junk food on TV before 9pm, and in paid online advertising at any time of the day, since 5 January. - Guardian
Higher-income households were the biggest beneficiaries of George Osborne's Help to Buy mortgage schemes, introduced in the 2010s, according to an analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) thinktank. Launched by the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition government in 2013, Help to Buy involved two separate schemes aimed at making home ownership more achievable in a period of rapid house price growth. - Guardian
The boss of JP Morgan has said that he is "not worried" about his own bank's $50bn (£37bn) exposure to private credit, despite recent warnings over the risks of "shadow banking". Jamie Dimon said that JP Morgan was well insulated from any wider ructions in the private credit sector. The chief executive told analysts: "You're going to have very large losses in private credit before it looks like banks are going to get hit. "It doesn't mean you won't feel some stress and strain, and you might have to do something about it, but I'm not particularly worried about it." - Telegraph
Sir Sadiq Khan's goal of building 88,000 homes a year now appears "impossible" to meet, a leading property analyst firm has warned. Construction started on just 2,103 private new-build homes in the three months to March, new findings from Molior showed, far from the 22,000 needed each quarter. This was an improvement on the quarterly average of 1,397 in 2025, but the rate of construction has still been described as "awful" by analysts at Molior. - Telegraph
The government and Ofwat, the water regulator, are "sleepwalking into a dreadful outcome" if they allow Thames Water to be taken over by its creditors. That is the view of Andrew Hunter, executive director of the Hong Kong infrastructure investor CKI, whose own bid for Thames Water was spurned last year by the utility's board. - The Times
US close
Major indices closed higher on Tuesday as market participants looked past a breakdown in Middle East peace talks to thumb over a number of big name bank earnings and March's producer price index.
At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.66% at 48,535.99, while the S&P 500 advanced 1.18% to 6,967.38 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 1.96% firmer at 23,639.08.
The Dow closed 317.74 points higher on Tuesday, extending gains recorded in the previous session after Donald Trump claimed the US had been "called by the other side" and that Iran would "like to make a deal very badly".
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