UK public companies are trading at a valuation discount totalling about £500 billion since the “scarring impact” of the Brexit vote six years ago, according to research by a City stockbroker.
Since 2016, when Britain voted to leave the European Union, the valuation of companies on the FTSE all-share index has settled at a 20 per cent discount to the rest of the world, on an adjusted basis, Panmure Gordon found. It is the largest divergence since the early 1990s.
The discount rises to 37 per cent on an unadjusted basis, when not taking account of the FTSE’s greater weighting of banks, miners and oil companies and the global market’s leaning towards tech companies, Panmure’s research showed.
Simon French, Panmure’s chief economist, said the large
