Some pointless charts about the FTSE 100 to celebrate its 40th birthday

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The FTSE 100 turns 40 today. Pop quiz: which company has been added to and deleted from the index the most times?

While you mull on that question (which we will answer below), here are some other useless bits of trivia. If you want a more cerebral take, we’d recommend John Authers.

A common way to reflect on how London’s blue-chip index has evolved over the years is to track how many of its original members are still present. By our count, that’s 29. The most common fate, by far, has been acquisition:

This represents a bit of a flawed methodology, however, because so many of the UK’s biggest companies represent a kind of Theseus’s Ship dynamic, the product of so many mergers and demergers that they only just about resemble the companies they were in 1984.

Here are some problem with the above chart:
— Royal Bank of Scotland is still in the FTSE 100, as NatWest. But National Westminster Bank, aka NatWest, is listed as being acquired.
— Commercial Union and General Accident merged, forming the company that eventually became Aviva. In the chart, Commercial Union is listed as still in the FTSE 100, but General Accident is listed as acquired.
— Royal Insurance and Sun Alliance & London Insurance merged, forming the company that would eventually become RSA Insurance, which was then acquired — so they both show up as acquired here.
— Several FTSE 100 companies have been bought and sold by other FTSE 100 companies in such a way that determining whether they are still present in the index is like tracking an individual clump of mud as it sweeps along a riverbed.
— Should the company known as Bass, in its 1984 iteration, be seen as having evolved into InterContinental Hotels, or into Mitchells & Butlers?

It also misses certain other nuances, such as companies (eg Marks & Spencer) that fell out of the index then got back.

To which you might say “why bother at all?” and we’d point you towards the headline of the article.

Still, here’s the current list of survivors, with their current names in parentheses where not blindingly obvious:

• Associated British Foods

• Barclays Bank

• Barratt Developments

• Bass (InterContinental Hotels Group)

• BAT Industries

• British Aerospace (BAE Systems)

• British Petroleum

• Commercial Union (Aviva)

• Glaxo Holdings

• Imperial Group

• Land Securities

• Legal & General Group

• Lloyds Bank

• Marks & Spencer

• Midland Bank (HSBC)

• Pearson (S.) & Son

• Prudential Corporation

• Reckitt & Colman

• Reed International (RELX)

• Rio Tinto – Zinc Corporation

• Royal Bank of Scotland Group (NatWest)

• Sainsbury

• Shell Trans. & Trad. Co.

• Smith & Nephew Associated Co’s.

• Standard Chartered Bank

• Sun Alliance & London Insurance (RSA Insurance)

• Tesco

• Unilever

• Whitbread & Co. ‘A’

One could posit the plethora of intra-FTSE 100 mergers that have taken place have weakened the index, by concentrating high-quality businesses into a smaller number of overall listings, creating more space for smaller (and therefore worse, because markets and capital are perfectly efficient) companies to float up into the top 100. Or one could think the opposite, or neither.

Despite the procedural problems plaguing the above information, here’s another chart that’s hopefully moderately interesting.

*record scratch* OK we really, really wanted to make a pretty racing bar chart that showed the changing market cap of the FTSE 100’s largest companies, so went to LSEG with this — we think — not unreasonable request.

We encountered the following problems (suggested musical accompaniment): :

— LSEG do not have this data going back before 1996.
— LSEG could not pull data that reflected the entrance of new members to the FTSE 100, or stop pulling market cap data once those stocks were delisted.
— Something was definitely wrong with the data because at no point did Shell become the most valuable company on the FTSE 100, even though it definitely was. We asked why this was the case, and LSEG couldn’t explain it. It looks like it was a case of not combining the share classes, something we couldn’t easily fix while WFH at nearly 7pm on a Wedsnesday.
— LSEG provided data that reset every five years to include new entrants, but this meant the chart we made reset every five years, which was visually horrifying.
— Stocks that were no longer listed said “DEAD” in their titles.
— These DEAD, delisted members lingered, corpse-like, until they either fell out of the top 10 or a five-year reset occurred.
— Each bar was individually coloured but would change colour after each five-year reset.
— The data, to repeat, seemed to be inaccurate.
— Time was rapidly running out to get this article out on the FTSE 100’s 40th birthday.

Reader, we gave up.

Overall, incidentally, there have been 366 uniquely-named companies in the FTSE 100 since its inception. Here, uninspiringly, are the words that make up their names as a word cloud:

One mention of “European” and two of “Colonial”, which to be honest isn’t the most surprising thing.

Oh, sorry, you wanted the answer to the question.

🥁

It’s… Tate & Lyle, which was added in 1991, demoted 1993, re-added 1995, demoted 1997, re-added 2004, demoted 2007, re-added 2008, demoted 2008, re-added 2008, demoted 2009, re-added 2011, and demoted in 2014.

That makes from six additions and six relegations total: the Norwich City of the FTSE 100. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say Norwich is the Tate & Lyle of the Premier League. In second place, with five promotions and demotions, is Hikma Pharmaceuticals.

This is all pointless information, BUT if one was considering attending Alphaville’s next pub quiz, some of it is probably worth remembering.