The Land that time forgot - The Times12 Dec 2022 18:52
Gist / snippets
….dangerous place teeming with dinosaurs and primitive human life. Some City of London sophisticates would have it that this is the status of the public equity markets these days, left behind by smart money seeking better returns from bonds, crypto, private equity or stocks traded further afield’
Yet they are a dwindling band. The gross number of companies traded on the London Stock Exchange’s main market and on Aim, the junior market, stands at fewer than 2,000, having dropped by more than a third in two decades. Strip out international stocks with secondary listings and investment vehicles and the number of actual UK companies is drifting dangerously close to 1,000. On a net basis, another vanishes every week.
The last time that the public markets were this sp**** was long before Burroughs put pen to paper. Ranald Michie, the stock exchange historian, suspects it could be as long ago as the 1860s, around the time of the failure of Overend, Gurney & Company, the Northern Rock of its day. So a renewed political focus, including within Jeremy Hunt’s package of Edinburgh reforms announced last Friday, can’t come soon enough.
However, new measures including simpler prospectuses and the restoration of independent equity research must work equally well for stocks worth less than £1 billion as they do for the flagship technology companies that ministers would love to lure into the FTSE 100.‘
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/acc4b980-7964-11ed-8486-22782b7fe87b?shareToken=545fd0fd917a71405758de0d56e20f6d
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