London’s FTSE 100 stock index will celebrate its 40th birthday on Wednesday. But it’s been a hard life for U.K’s blue-chip barometer since it came of age.
After the Footsie
UK:UKX,
as it’s known, was launched in January 1984, an idyllic youth has given way to an austere adulthood for the U.K.’s blue-chip index, according to Laith Khalaf, head of investment analysis at AJ Bell.
“The U.K. stock market finds itself in a quagmire of existential angst,” he said in a note sent to media. “The headline index has made almost no progress since the start of the century, and in the last decade the Footsie has been totally eclipsed by the U.S. stock market, which is winning company listings and financial flows.”
It all started so well. Khalaf has crunched the numbers and found that for the last six years of the 1980’s the Footsie enjoyed an annualized return in British…
