London Stock Exchange Monthly Market Report For July 2004 - Record Month For AIM IPOs

July was a record month for AIM, the London Stock Exchange’s international market for smaller growing companies, with 42 IPOs raising £562.7 million between them. There were also 4 IPOs on the main market, and new entrants to both markets raised a total of £1.5 billion.

During the month, there were also year on year increases in trading volumes across the Exchange’s markets. There were 5,259,545 trades with a value of £360 billion during July, representing nine and 14 per cent increases on July 2003, respectively.

SETS attracted an average of 154,797 trades each day, up 30 per cent on July 2003. The average daily value traded on SETS was £3.4 billion, up 23 percent on the same month last year. The total number of trades on SETS during the month was up 25 per cent on the previous year at 3.41 million, while the value traded increased 18 per cent to £74.4 billion.

These year on year increases in part reflect the contribution made by EUROSETS, the London Stock Exchange’s new trading platform for Dutch equities, which saw a total of 36,201 trades in July, a more than four-fold increase on June. The total value traded was €1.2 billion, over five times the €222.6 million value traded in June.

SETSmm also contributed to the overall growth in SETS trades with a record 288,279 equity trades executed in July 2004, worth a total of £3.1 billion.

Last month’s record number of ETF trades was narrowly broken, with 10,836 bargains on the Exchange during July 2004. The value of ETFs traded amounted to £354 million.

There were 22 business days in July 2004, compared with 23 in July 2003.