US tech giants have a penchant for taking stakes in start-ups they do business with. Microsoft, valued at $1.83tn, qualifies as the former. The London Stock Exchange Group, established in 1698, hardly resembles the latter. So the purchase of a 4 per cent stake in LSEG worth about £1.5bn ($1.8bn) by the software leviathan requires scrutiny.
On one level, it has become normal for cloud computing companies to extend stake-taking to larger customers. The extra dimension is that LSEG is itself now primarily a data company. Indices and price data matter more to it than stuffy old share trading.
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