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FTSE 100 Live: Index hits record high as AstraZeneca and GSK shares soar

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The Morning Wire Live Blog
The Morning Wire FTSE 100 liveblog with your top market stories.

Good morning from the liveblog team at Morning Wire.

Some acronyms are so entrenched in common parlance that they need not be explained: NHS, GDP, MOT.

Up until now, we at Morning Wire thought ‘IPO’ sat squarely within that category. But the listings pipeline has become so thin, we may have to start reminding readers – and ourselves – what it stands for.

Just £184m was raised on the London Stock Exchange in the first nine months of the year,  a far cry from the roughly £17bn raised as recently as 2021 and making 2025 the worst year for listings in more than three decades. The amounts raised represent a tiny fraction of the roughly £40bn that has been raised in the US over the same period.

The ranking placed London, once Europe’s premier listing destination, behind Sweden, Spain, Switzerland, Turkey, Poland and Germany and only marginally ahead of Greece and the Netherlands, according to figures compiled by Bloomberg – putting the capital a dismal 23rd in the world.

We can only hope the fourth quarter brings better numbers for the City, before we all lose IPOs from our lexicon altogether.

Here’s a summary of our top headlines from yesterday: