Item 5. Market for Registrant’s Common Equity, Related Stockholder Matters and Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Market Information

Verisk trades under the ticker symbol “VRSK” on the NASDAQ Global Select Market. Our common stock was first publicly traded on October 7, 2009. As of February 16, 2018, the closing price of our common stock was $98.79 per share, as reported by the NASDAQ Global Select Market. As of February 16, 2018, there were approximately 41 stockholders of record. We believe the number of beneficial owners is substantially greater than the number of record holders, because a large portion of common stock is held in “street name” by brokers.

We have not paid or declared any cash dividends on our common stock during the two most recent fiscal years and we currently do not intend to pay dividends on our common stock. We have a publicly announced share repurchase plan and repurchased a total of 53,992,688 shares since our IPO through December 31, 2017. As of December 31, 2017, we had 379,124,108 shares of treasury stock.

The following table shows the quarterly range of the closing high and low per share trading prices for our common stock as reported by the NASDAQ Global Select Market for the years ending December 31:

Performance Graph

The graph below compares the cumulative total stockholder return on $100 invested in our common stock, with the cumulative total return (assuming reinvestment of dividends) on $100 invested in the S&P 500 Index and an aggregate of peer issuers in the information industry. The peer issuers used for this graph are Equifax Inc., Factset Research Systems Inc., IHS Markit, MSCI Inc., Moody’s Corporation, S&P Global, and Nielsen Holdings plc. Each peer issuer was weighted according to its respective market capitalization on December 31, 2012.

COMPARISON OF CUMULATIVE TOTAL RETURN

Assumes $100 Invested on December 31, 2012

Assumes Dividend Reinvested

Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2017

Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

There were no unregistered sales of equity securities by the Company during 2017.

Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Our board of directors has authorized a share repurchase program, or Repurchase Program, since May 2010, of up to $2.8 billion. As of December 31, 2017, $366.2 million remains available for share repurchases. Under the Repurchase Program, we may repurchase stock in the market or as otherwise determined by us. These authorizations have no expiration dates and may be suspended or terminated at any time. We had no share repurchases for the quarter ended December 31, 2017.