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. As of February 14, 2020, there were approximately 50 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.

On February 13, 2019, April 29, 2019, July 24, 2019, and October 23, 2019, our Board approved a cash dividend of $0.25 per share of common stock issued and outstanding to the holders of record as of March 15, 2019, June 14, 2019, September 13, 2019, and December 13, 2019, respectively. The cash dividends of $40.9 million, $41.0 million, and $40.8 million, and $40.8 million were paid on March 29, 2019, June 28, 2019, September 30, 2019, and December 31, 2019, respectively. We have a publicly announced share repurchase plan and repurchased a total of 60,053,306 shares since our IPO through December 31, 2019. As of December 31, 2019, we had 380,841,474 shares of treasury stock.

Performance Graph

The graph below compares the cumulative total stockholder return of our common stock with the cumulative total return of the S&P 500 index, an aggregate index of our proxy peers used in last year’s statement and an aggregate index of our proxy peers used in this year’s statements. In this transition year, the table and the graph below include both the prior and the new indices of peer companies. The peer issuers used for this graph are Alliance Data Systems Corporation, CoStar Group Inc., Equifax Inc., Factset Research Systems Inc., Fidelity National Information Services, Inc., Fiserv, Inc., Gartner, Inc., IHS Markit, Moody’s Corporation, MSCI Inc., Nielsen Holdings plc, S&P Global, and TransUnion. The prior peer issuers used for this graph are the same as above excluding CoStar Group, Inc. The graph assumes that the value of investment in our Common stock and in each index was $100 at December 31, 2014 and that all cash dividends were reinvested.

COMPARISON OF CUMULATIVE TOTAL RETURN

Assumes $100 Invested on December 31, 2014

Assumes Dividend Reinvested

Fiscal Year Ended December 31, 2019

Recent Sales of Unregistered Securities

There were no unregistered sales of equity securities by the Company during 2019.

Issuer Purchases of Equity Securities

Our board of directors has authorized a share repurchase program, or Repurchase Program, since May 2010, of up to $3.8 billion, inclusive of the $500.0 million authorization approved by the board on February 12, 2020. As of December 31, 2019, $127.6 million remains available for share repurchases. In December 2018, March 2019, June 2019, and September 2019, we entered into four Accelerated Share Repurchase, or ASR, agreements to repurchase shares of its common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $250.0 million. These ASRs were settled in March 2019, June 2019, September 2019, and November 2019. In December 2019, we entered into an additional ASR agreement to repurchase shares of its common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $50.0 million. This ASR will be settled in February 2020. 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. Since the introduction of share repurchase as a feature of our capital management strategies in 2010, we have repurchased shares with an aggregated value of $3,172.4 million. Our share repurchases for the quarter ended December 31, 2019 are set forth below:

(1) In September 2019, we entered into an ASR agreement to repurchase shares of our common stock for an aggregate purchase price of $50.0 million with HSBC Bank USA, N.A. The ASR agreement is accounted for as a treasury stock transaction and a forward stock purchase agreement indexed to our common stock. Upon the payment of the aggregate purchase price of $50.0 million on October 1, 2019, we received 252,940 shares of our common stock at a price of $158.14 per share. Upon final settlement in November 2019, we received an additional 81,862 shares as determined by the daily volume weighted average share price of our common stock during the term of the ASR agreement, bringing the total shares received under this ASR agreement to 334,802 and a final average price paid of $149.34 per share. In addition to the ASR agreement, we also repurchased 327,159 shares of our common stock at an average price of $140.62 in November 2019.