The stock exchange on the Thames is currently not making big leaps.

It has stagnated for a few weeks, defending the high level it has achieved.

At the end of July, after a small attack of weakness, the FTSE100 index rose again well over 7000 points.

At the beginning of the week it increased by 0.7 percent to 7186 points.

Since the beginning of the year, the stock market barometer of the largest hundred companies on the London Stock Exchange has risen sharply by around 15 percent, with the British pound also appreciating somewhat, which is dampening the foreign currency income of the very internationally oriented FTSE100 groups.

Without this, the upswing would be even stronger.

Philip Plickert

Business correspondent based in London.

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The strong recovery of the British economy after the Corona slump is driving prices. This year, the FTSE100 has even outperformed - calculated in pounds - the German DAX and the Spanish Ibex. However, the British stock market development is slightly below that of the Eurostoxx50 index, which, calculated in pounds, improved by 16.5 percent, as Goldman Sachs shows in a current overview.

What is particularly pleasing to the British stock exchange traders is the number of IPOs (Initial Public Offerings) this year. The London Stock Exchange saw more new major IPOs in 2021 than it has done for a long time, well over a dozen. These include a number of heavyweight IPOs with company valuations in the mid single-digit billion range. Most of the newcomers did well after the stock market launch, although there were initially loud complaints about the flop with the food delivery service after the Deliveroo IPO in March. Deliveroo was offered far too expensive, and the uncertainty about the longer-term profit prospects caused the price to crash.

Some newcomers to the stock market like Darktrace, on the other hand, have risen steeply, while others are sluggish. The share of the shoe manufacturer Dr. Martens, for example, who went on the floor in February with a valuation of 4.5 billion pounds (5.2 billion euros), has lost slightly, it is now 3 percent below the issue price. In contrast, Deliveroo has recovered after its first bad day. Since the lousy start with a big minus, the paper has risen by 25 percent. Things also went badly for AlphaWave IP Group, a Canadian specialist in semiconductors and wireless IT infrastructure, which was valued at 2.4 billion pounds on the first trading day in London, but had to pocket a minus of almost a fifth and not from that has recovered.

On the other hand, the development of Darktrace, the cybersecurity company from Cambridge, which is successful with AI protection programs against hacker attacks all over the world, is particularly spectacularly positive. After the Deliveroo flop, the Darktrace strategists approached the IPO rather cautiously and lowered the price range for the issue price. The specialist in computer security through artificial intelligence was valued at just 2.2 billion pounds in early May. Since the rather cheap debut, the stock has skyrocketed. On the first day, the issue price of 250 pence rose by a good 30 percent; after a four-month price rally, the value has risen by more than 160 percent. The price of Endeavor Mining, an international mining company that operates several gold mines in West Africa, has exploded even more.After the company registered on the Cayman Islands entered the main market index in London in June, the price rose by as much as 230 percent.

Plus for forex traders

The stock of payment service provider Wise, known for cross-border money transfers and currency exchanges, has gained a good 16 percent since its IPO in July - with a valuation of almost £ 8 billion.

A number of other newcomers to the London stock exchange have done far better than the overall British market, such as Auction Technology Group, Big Technologies, Trustpilot, Baltic Classifieds Group, Bridgepoint Group, TinyBuild Inc. and a few others.

In contrast, the bathroom decorator Victorian Plumbing could not meet the high expectations and lost a good quarter of its value after its debut with a billion pound valuation.

Even if you add such flops and heavyweights like Deliveroo, investors who took part in the IPOs at the start of the stock market have beaten the FTSE100 by a good 20 percent this year, as Bloomberg has calculated.

Meanwhile, there have been some postponements and farewells in the large-value index, the FTSE100 flagship, which are rather regrettable for London. The Australian mining group BHP, by market valuation the second largest stock after AstraZeneca, by stock exchange weighting the tenth most important on the Thames, the London Stock Exchange is turning its back. BHP is giving up the double listing and will no longer be traded in London in the future. The food supplier Just Eat, who is thrown out of the FTSE100, takes an involuntary goodbye. The TV broadcaster ITV and the industrial group Weir cannot stay in the guide value index either. Instead, the defense company Meggitt and the supermarket chain Morrisons, whose share prices have jumped so much after takeover bids, that they have qualified for the leading value index.