Three IPOs joined London's main market in the half that saw thirty companies leave

Eleven companies joined London's Main Market in the first half of 2026, and six of those were transfers up from AIM. That leaves at most five that were not already on the exchange, of which three were IPOs ^[6][4]. Set three floats against more than thirty departures announced or completed this year and London is bringing in about one new listing for every ten it loses ^[2][5].

The register has fallen by 895 names, from 2,429 to 1,534, which is 36.8 per cent of the 2015 count and an average of roughly eighty companies a year for eleven years ^[1][1][2][3]. This year's thirty-odd exits are about two per cent of what is left ^[7].

cryptobriefing.com attributes the drift to a valuation gap, reporting that London-listed companies have consistently traded below their US-listed peers without citing a multiple to size it ^[8]. The same account names the buyer side. British pension funds, once anchors for domestic equities, have spent years rotating out of UK stocks, leaving thinner volumes and less analyst coverage ^[9].

The reform package taking effect this summer simplifies AIM rules and scraps the mandatory waiting period before banks can publish research on a newly listed company ^[10]. Both changes cut the cost and the timing friction of going public. The buyer side is untouched. If the binding constraint is the domestic bid, as that account argues, the reforms will show up first in pension allocations, and nothing on the reform list reaches them ^[9][10].

A current holder collects the discount only when a bid pays it out in cash. Nuveen agreed £9.9bn for Schroders in February 2026 ^[3]. That is 7.6 times the £1.3bn the whole market raised in secondary issuance across the half ^[7][6], and it is a payment to Schroders shareholders, not capital raised by a London-listed company.

The source thins out here. easyJet's exit comes through a US takeover, while Flutter completed its own exit on 3 August 2026 by moving its primary listing to New York ^[4][5]: the first ends a holding for cash, the second keeps the shareholder invested under a different index. The flow is not only westward. Amsterdam, Paris and Frankfurt have been competing for listings that once defaulted to London, and Brexit removed the passporting that made London the default gateway for European capital ^[12].

The measure that would break the reading offered here is a second half in which new floats run ahead of exits, or a published premium on the Nuveen and easyJet bids large enough to show that London holders were paid out of the gap. Neither figure is in this material, and the first half produced three IPOs ^[6].