Weekend reading: Will the last company to leave the LSE please turn off the lights?

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• 

  Mogul

  1 c-strong July 18, 2026, 5:44 pm

  While I’m not saying it’s exactly “good” that these companies are being removed from the UK public market, without (for now) being replaced by new companies, it may not be all bad, either. I would argue that this is a necessary part of the process of the market — especially the FTSE250 — being re-rated upwards and generally becoming more attractive.

  It’s been obvious for a long time to anyone who looked that UK smaller caps were very undervalued, but somehow this didn’t result in much movement.

  When companies are regularly getting large acquisition premiums, surely this will attract more interest from general investors, and not just big US acquirers? Or am I over-optimistic?
• 

  Maven

  2 Larsen July 18, 2026, 9:42 pm

  Timely from Ted Gioia, we just cancelled Netflix after 12 years. Iplayer normally has about 100 films on at any one time, 50 of which I might want to watch. I would go on Netflix and spend half an hour scrolling and find nothing I wanted.
• 

  Mogul

  3 Brod July 19, 2026, 7:55 am

  FIRE and wide – great article about health span but absolutely nothing about exercise?

  Epic fail.
• 

  Maven

  4 Trufflehunt July 19, 2026, 2:34 pm

  Maybe the new PM will have some kind of new industrial and manufacturing policy, beyond the mouthing of the words that previous PM’s of all flavours have emitted for the last 45 years. Could this also include measures to restrict the ability of foreign entities from marching in and buying up British companies. I believe the EU is considering some-such.

  On the subject of the new PM, I’ ve twice in the last couple of days received emails from the Labour party urging me to join. They must have retained my email address from 10 (?) years ago when I paid my £30 to join as a supporter of Jeremy Corbyn because the party no longer looked like one I recognised as Labour. Ironic that they’ve contacted me now, given that the names popping up, the PM himself really, Purnell, Yvette Cooper etc, all the machine politicians of Blair… were precisely what I wanted to see the back of.
• 

  Maven

  5 xxd09 July 19, 2026, 4:34 pm

  Did Andy have a Trumpian moment when he said that he is going to start drilling for oil on Monday?
  xxd09
• 

  Mogul

  6 SteveK July 20, 2026, 8:45 am

  FYI: the last bit of the article: “Not a Monevator member yet? As you can see there’s quite a back catalogue now – so sign up and dive in!” is only visible to *existing* Monevator members since this isn’t the first Weekend News of the month!
• 

  Maven

  7 The Investor July 20, 2026, 11:01 am

  @c-strong — Well , experience in recent years suggests you are being overly optimistic since the takeover boom has been going on for at least four years, without the re-rating. (A re-rating of sorts has come more recently, but I think that was driven by other factors, perhaps the misplaced belief we’d turned a corner on political stability. So we’ll have to watch that space now. Again!)

  @Larsen — Yes, Netflix doesn’t seem as indispensable as it once did. I’m surely watching much more YouTube nowadays, but I’ve still yet to pay up for the latter despite hating all the ads. Maybe time to consider a swap!

  @SteveK — Oh dear, thanks (‘thanks’ 😉 ) for highlighting. 🙂 Probably I have some kind of Pavlovian muscle memory where I can’t prevent myself typing a ‘sign up’ when I mention Membership nowadays.
• 

  Mogul

  8 Sparschwein July 20, 2026, 1:08 pm

  Thanks for the links.
  Here’s one from the FT that I think deserves more attention:
  “UK pension insurers raise exposure to opaque private credit”
  https://archive.is/8q9UD#selection-1475.0-1475.59

  Annuities make so much sense, in theory. But something is wrong in the system when safety-seeking UK pensioners are made the bagholders for dodgy private credit and AI data-centre loans (that’s “infrastructure”, right). The wheeze relies on opaque risk transfer, debt securitisation and self-dealing credit ratings. Sounds familiar from the GFC.
  FSCS? Underfunded by orders of magnitude
  State guarantee? Questionable if the UK govt could afford another major bailout
• 

  Mogul

  9 ZXSpectrum48k July 20, 2026, 5:31 pm

  @Sparschwein. It’s not just dodgy private credit. Oracle got downgraded to one grade above junk just last week. I’d say S&P was being generous. Ellison has gone all-in on OpenAI. S&P revised Oracle’s free-cash flow deficit for fiscal year 2027 from $24bn to $42bn! S&P assume the cashflow goes positive by 2029 but what happens if anything goes wrong? All of those margin loans Ellison has securitized with Oracle shares. Not a doom loop at all …