It’s natural for clients to feel more comfortable investing in their home markets, in familiar companies with high street names among them, but this home bias is not relevant in today’s capital markets. Globalisation means that companies have economic exposures that reach much further than their domicile, giving them a wider diversification of financial drivers.

We should bear in mind that what we are talking about here is largely the country of listing. When a company decides to come to the markets to raise funding via an Initial Public Offering (IPO), it has a choice where to list its shares and there are real-world consequences of the exchange that it selects. A company’s choice may well be influenced by how onerous the listing requirements of alternative exchanges are found to be. Most exchanges allow foreign issuers, so domicile or country of business is not a limiting factor.