RE: Update6 Feb 2025 08:48
Gone are the days of mass interest. Individuals investing in shares is a very small niche indeed. The small-cap market is therefore also as dead as the legendary Monty Python parrot, with listings on the small-cap AIM market down from 2,000 shares to 600, with money raising down to six-figure sums that wouldn’t buy you a studio apartment in the city of London or indeed cover the cost of a prospectus or a couple of years of adviser fees.
Why? It is no mystery. If your market doesn’t go up in a generation, why would you play the stock market game? For a market to flourish the participants need to get a return; if they do not, after a time they lose interest. If they lose money as they must in such an environment, they will leave even faster. Over time, the system drains investor money out of the market and slowly yet surely turns the reservoir of capital into an empty desert. In a trading environment where the main market access point has been forced by the regulator to admit 70% of its customers lose, and those in the know are aware the average customer is churned and burned in less than a year, you simply won’t have stock market investing as a main stream activity.