Companies: PMK   

Share market operator PLUS Markets Group intends to leave AIM for its own PLUS-Listed platform.

Simon Brickles, chief executive of the fast-expanding company, says it will move its shares this year from AIM to PLUS-Listed, which claims to offer specialist issuers a ‘cost-effective alternative to the London Stock Exchange main market’. Pointing out that PLUS Markets handled £8.83 billion of share trades in the first three months of this year – more than the £7.5 billion handled for the whole of 2007 – he suggests that PLUS could find itself handling ‘more than half of the share trading in half of all the publicly traded companies in Britain’.

He says that prospect depends on the authorities allowing PLUS to trade all AIM-quoted companies without first going through the cumbersome process of obtaining their prior consent. PLUS already trades 80 AIM companies and reports that it now handles more than half the trading in 60 of them.

PLUS can already trade fully listed companies without prior consent and now handles between 3.54 and 4.88 per cent by value in dealings in heavyweight LSE counters such as Royal Bank of Scotland and Standard Life. PLUS, which offers low- or zero-cost trading facilities and seeks to make money by charging for market data, insists that ending the AIM ‘anomaly’ is in line with the European Union’s MiFID financial markets directive.

After increasing turnover 43 per cent last year to £3.1 million, the company sustained a 150 per cent loss increase to £3 million. PLUS says it has £21 million cash and will become ‘cash flow generative’ if, as expected, the authorities give it the green light on AIM trading.

Brickles argues that a once-rumoured deal with the Project Turquoise inter-bank share dealing venture would be ‘complementary’ to PLUS Markets’ existing activities, but does not suggest any such deal is imminent. He says the company thinks it is time to push its PLUS-Quoted market (formerly Ofex) more aggressively.

AIM investors have recently tended to be sceptical about PLUS Markets, whose shares have fallen from a 2006 peak of 38.75p to 12.5p, valuing the company at £39.3 million. However, the company says liquidity is improving healthily, despite some wide PLUS-Quoted spreads. If what is being put together now pays off, they could repay a bold flutter.

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