ISSUE NO. 3 · WEDNESDAY 5 AUGUST 2026

Segro's exit, London's missing listings, and a 6% rating for the Prime Minister

Prologis has agreed to buy Segro for £14.3bn, and Segro's shares moved 1%. A FTSE 100 landlord is going at a 39% premium to where it traded before the approach — a price the board spent the summer calling too low. Eleven British companies worth over £1bn have left London this year. The index is not falling apart. It is being bought.

What is missing is anything arriving to replace it. Seven new listings raised £557m across the whole of this year, against £7.9bn for one Deliveroo float in 2021, and the year's largest arrival was the sovereign wealth fund of Uzbekistan. The businesses already inside are not the problem: HSBC made £7.5bn of pre-tax profit in the quarter and restarted its buyback, 60% up on the same quarter last year. Assets that earn like that are precisely the ones somebody else wants to own. Further out, BlackRock has taken two tokenised money market funds live, and wants both to qualify as stablecoin reserves.

Below in full: what Prologis is really buying, why the listings drought now runs into 2027, and why just 6% of Britain's scale-up founders call Andy Burnham pro-business. After those, the numbers, today's diary, and one calculator worth five minutes.

Lead

£14.3bn is about to walk out of the FTSE 100, and Segro's shares moved 1% on the news.

Prologis is paying a 39% premium to where Segro traded when it first approached, having had £12.6bn rejected last month. Shareholders take Prologis stock plus a £3.5bn partial cash alternative, with completion expected in the first half of next year. Eleven firms worth over £1bn have now left London this year. The board spent the summer calling the price too low, and when it was agreed the shares shrugged — which is really a story about where large British assets get priced, not about warehouses. Read the full story →

More News

£557m. That is what seven new listings raised on the London market across the whole of this year, yet a single Deliveroo float pulled in £7.9bn back in 2021.

The year's largest arrival was the sovereign wealth fund of Uzbekistan, which floated for £1.4bn in May. Peel Hunt expects the drought to run into 2027, and Andy Burnham's government has produced no listings policy. The exits take the headlines; the missing arrivals decide how big the index eventually gets. His team has the whole autumn to produce something, and whether they bother will show up in the 2027 numbers long before it shows up in a speech. Read the full story →

Just 6% of Britain's top scale-up founders rate Andy Burnham as a pro-business prime minister.

83% of Helm's founders expect trading conditions to hold steady or worsen ahead of a late October Budget, and reversing the employers' national insurance rise would cost around £25bn a year. Burnham has made real gestures towards small business, and the founders behind £8bn of revenue still rate him at 6%. Warm words cost nothing, which is precisely why they buy nothing. The employers' national insurance decision is the one signal the private sector will actually read. Read the full story →

The Numbers

Nothing moved in the official data again, and the FTSE reading below is still the 31 July close — the market feed has not refreshed since. Worth noting anyway that the index sitting at 94% of its twelve-month range is the same one about to lose £14.3bn of Segro.

On the Diary

• Today, 9.30am BST — S&P Global UK Services PMI, July final. The last clean read on July output before the MPC meets on 17 September, and the first thing that would put a cut back on the table.
• Tomorrow, 9.30am BST — S&P Global UK Construction PMI, July. This survey spent the whole of last year below the 50 line that separates growth from contraction. If the recovery is real anywhere, it should turn up here, and it has not yet.
• Tomorrow, 9.30am BST — ONS Business insights and impact on the UK economy. A fortnightly read on what firms actually report about trading conditions. It is the check on that 83% above, from a survey nobody is trying to win.

The Toolbox

One tool from the site each issue, chosen to fit what has just happened. Free, no sign-up, and it shows its workings.

Employer NI calculator

"Reversing the employers' national insurance rise would cost £25bn a year. Here is what it currently costs your payroll."

The Close

£14.3bn is leaving the index this morning, and £557m arrived across the whole year. That is not a market being sold off in a panic, it is one being wound down by arithmetic — and the only lever anyone has actually named for reversing it is a line on employers' national insurance in an October Budget. Watch what Burnham's team publishes this autumn, rather than what it says.

If something here is wrong, or there is something you want dug into, just reply. It comes straight to me.

MJB