SpaceX IPO could get wave of Brits back into equity markets, Peel Hunt boss says
The success of the trillion-dollar SpaceX IPO could help drive a wave of fresh interest into investing in the stock market, the boss of one of London’s biggest brokers has said.
The float, which raised a whopping $75bn (£56bn), included millions of shares allocated to UK retail investors thought to be worth around £271m, with many investors seeing their requested allocation cut back due to high demand.
Peel Hunt chief executive Steven Fine said the listing had “focused a lot of attention on equity markets,” which has been enhanced by the expected floats of AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI as well as the government-backed ‘Savvy the Squirrel’ campaign to encourage Brits to put their spare cash into stocks and shares.
“These are once-in-a-generation public listings of companies that you’re unlikely to see other comparisons, and it just focuses a bit of attention on what the art of the possible might be from equity markets,” Fine told City PM.
“It’s just, ‘wow, this is exciting’ – retail want to participate. And retail are far more stable than you would think, they’re far more sticky than you would think.
“And I think there’s also a bit of a recognition that the stock market in the UK has quite considerably climbed a big wall of worry. There’s this sort of, ‘gosh,’ it’s not all about Meta, it’s not all about Apple, it’s not all about Nvidia. There are things going on in the home market that actually are pretty interesting and quite dynamic.”
Fine’s remarks come as Peel Hunt reported a 57 per cent surge in revenue to £143.5m for the year to end March, after its investment banking arm cheered a more than doubling in turnover on the back of deal fees collected from its M&A practice.
The London-based business turned around its loss from last year to deliver a pre-tax profit of £21.1m, and issued a final dividend of 4.9p.
The AIM-listed investment bank said it counted 62 members of the FTSE 350 as clients, with the average market cap across its client base jumping by more than 30 per cent to £1.1bn.
Peel Hunt shares rose 3.1 per cent to 99.5p. The stock is up by 13.1 per cent over the past twelve months.