For 30 years the Alternative Investment Market (AIM) has been home to Britain’s smaller, nimbler quoted firms. Born in 1995 as a junior market, AIM was meant to give ambitious companies access to equity capital without the heavy compliance burden of the main London Stock Exchange.
Three decades on, AIM remains an underappreciated corner of global capital markets. A new study from Octopus Investments, its inaugural *Growth Barometer*, suggests that investors might be missing one of the best buying opportunities in British equities since the financial crisis.
The report comes at a fraught time for AIM. Share prices across the index have struggled in recent years, battered first by rising interest rates and then by global risk aversion towards smaller firms. Since late 2021 the FTSE AIM50 index has shed 37% of its value. Yet beneath that weakness, Octopus finds that operating performance has been strikingly strong: aggregate profits…
