Cheer up, its not that bad

Us Brits are great at complaining but not so good at celebrating.

We've had 23 IPOs in London vs. 5 in Paris, 2 in Frankfurt and 0 in Amsterdam and when we launched our largest tech IPO in July - CAB Payments - it was #3 globally outside of China.

While IPOs are down about 30% YoY, total capital raised is up.

This week, I learned that a few pipeline companies are converting and all the advisers that I talk to are starting to feel more hopeful about 2024.

But yes, I should have trusted my gut and bought NVIDIA shares on 3-Jan.

I'm often asked what we're doing at London Stock Exchange to fix the system, the world, global poverty. Sometimes quite aggressively. Hearts are in the right place but sometimes folks aren't aware that we're a cog in a wheel and we all have a role to play.

I can assure you that we're not resting on our laurels. While the UK machine works, it's like an old Dell laptop and we want to unleash the power of quantum.

My CEO, Julia Hoggett, helped form the CMIT - Capital Markets Industry Taskforce where she is Chair. CMIT's vision is to strengthen the UK's financial ecosystem to ensure we are the place where globally consequential companies not only start, grow, scale but choose to stay stay. This helps create jobs, fosters innovation and growth while helps savers, pensions and policy holders get better outcomes. When CMIT organised its first conference on a Friday in July, they packed out the stock exchange. This was the first of many big tent conversations. Its not a closed shop and not just a talking shop. Check it out and get involved.

In the UK, we have world leading universities and the 3rd largest tech ecosystem in the world. The ingredients are all here but we've got wood to chop.

In 2021, a single Canadian pension fund invested more in one UK company than all of our pension funds did across ALL UK privates companies that same year. William Wright and New Financial LLP estimate that there's are more than ￡5tn sitting in UK pensions and insurance assets - the 2nd in the world after the US.?

In 2000, 39% of the UK stock market was part of this asset pool. Today, that allocation is just 4%!

And just 1% of ￡5tn goes into private UK businesses and so our VCs have to look to overseas LPs and our pensioners, who don't know what they don't know, miss out on many of our best companies.

There's been lots of excellent reviews and lots of talk. Good constructive talk and for the first time in 20 years, I'm seeing a lot of alignment between public and private markets. This is now turning into action as we see with the Mansion House Compact, an agreement between 9 of the UK's largest DC pension providers to commit 5% of their assets (some ￡50bn worth) into unlisted equities by 2030 - privately held companies and those on AIM.

And beyond helping drive the biggest capital markets reforms in 40 years, here's some more things that we're doing at LSEG (London Stock Exchange Group) - this isn't exhaustive:

- We invested in PrimaryBid to put the 'P' back into IPO - a win/win for companies and retail investors

- We invested in Floww to help entrepreneurs raise early-stage funding

- We're working with the HM Treasury and Financial Conduct Authority and many of you to launch the Intermittent Trading Venue (ITV) next year. This will enable private companies to run periodic auctions for secondary shares and provide liquidity to angels and early stage investors and employees without forcing an exit. It will also make it easier for funds to invest in private companies

- We've leveraging the tech, data & analytics that we acquired with LSEG Data & Analytics to give our public company clients have access to global research, Reuters news and ESG benchmarking scores data while enabling better investor reach who their Issuer Services pages and our SparkLive webcasting platform

- With our shareholder and partner Microsoft, we're also democratising access to fundamentals - imagine Refinitiv, an LSEG business data in Microsoft Office, powered by copilot.

- We've also backed the FinTech Growth Fund with Barclays, NatWest Group, Mastercard, Peel Hunt and others, to help this UK FinTechs scale

The hardest thing to change is culture but help us in calling out absurdities like attitudes towards entrepreneurship and pay and let's crowd out the overblown stories of the odd overpriced IPO and fraud with the many real success stories.?

A healthy stock market, whether you choose to use it or not, just means you have more options and choice has to drive better outcomes.