London is Europe’s major financial centre and one of the world’s two leading financial hubs. This is unlikely to change following Brexit. Its main competition is with New York, Singapore, Hong Kong and other centres like Shanghai that will emerge in the coming years.
However, the headline of today’s main story in the Financial Times proclaimed, ‘Amsterdam ousts London as Europe’s top share trading hub’. The article correctly reported that more shares were traded last month on ‘Euronext, Amsterdam and the Dutch arms of CBOE Europe and Turquoise in January’ than ‘in London’.
While the data in this story is naturally correct, it needs to be put within context in order to draw the right conclusions. There are probably seventeen exchanges in western Europe. Euronext is third in size, the Deutsche Borse second and the London Stock Exchange (LSE) first. But London is not just captured in the LSE.
In fact, the bulk of trading never makes it onto these exchanges.
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