The chief executive of challenger stock exchange Aquis has said the UK is in store for a “tidal wave of international investment” following Labour’s election victory.
Alasdair Haynes, who founded Aquis in 2012, argued that more political stability in the UK would attract higher levels of capital from foreign investors – particularly the US – over the next five to 10 years.
“I’m extremely bullish about what’s going to happen in the UK and what’s going to happen in Europe,” he told eToro’s Digest & Invest podcast. “The UK in particular, I think, has been a very, very cheap market and it hasn’t been invested in because it hasn’t had a stable government for a number of years.”
London-listed firms have seen a surge in takeover interest this year as they continue to trade at a discount to their counterparts in Europe, the US and elsewhere.
“Regardless of how you voted in the last general election, now it looks like we actually have a stable government with a significant majority,” Haynes added.
“I think that is going to open the doors for literally a tidal wave of international investment to be able to come into the UK. The capital will arrive not only domestically, which it has been in the past few years, but actually internationally and particularly from the United States.”
Haynes further stressed the importance of retail investment in bolstering the Britain’s capital markets, following nearly three straight years of heavy outflows from UK funds and less liquid markets after Brexit.
“We need to get the public back into public markets,” Haynes said. “The appetite and interest in equity [in the US] is huge, and we don’t have that here.”
Retail investors pulled a record £1.8bn from UK equity funds in May, according to the Investment Association
“[Aquis] is about bringing competition into our industry to change UK capital markets,” Haynes added. It’s through that that we can start to get scale-up capital to vitally important businesses to change the economy in the UK.”