🚪 Door Close, Window Open

SMG Swiss Marketplace Group’s book was covered in an hour. Last September, the platform listed on the SIX Swiss Exchange at a market capitalisation of €4.7bn, pricing at the top of its range. BlackRock and Pictet came in as cornerstone investors. Not New York. Not Nasdaq. Zurich.

Two weeks later, Verisure raised €3.2bn in Stockholm at a valuation of €13.7bn, the largest PE-backed IPO ever completed in Europe. Alecta, AMF and Swedbank Robur on the register. Stockholm ended 2025 as the continent’s leading listing venue and fifth in the world, without routing a single deal through Wall Street.

For two decades, the transatlantic reflex rested on three promises: liquidity, valuation, and analyst coverage. The data is now dismantling all three.

US liquidity is real, but heavily concentrated: 79 mega-caps account for more than half of all trading volume. For a mid-cap in the €1bn to €5bn range, daily turnover runs at 0.3% in the US against 0.1% in Europe. The gap exists. It does not justify underwriting fees of 4 to 7%, when Zurich charges between 2 and 5%.

The supposed American valuation premium is largely an artefact of sector composition. Technology accounts for roughly a third of the US market, against 7% in Europe. Strip out the largest caps and the discount narrows from 30% to just over 20%. That is not a structural penalty on European companies; it reflects the mechanical difference between two very different indices. Of the 130 European companies that migrated to US markets over the past decade, 70% now trade below their IPO price, three quarters have failed to outperform the European market, and only two have joined the S&P 500. The prestige of a Wall Street address carries a steep price when index inclusion never materialises.

Analyst coverage tells a similar story. In the €1bn to €5bn bracket, a foreign issuer listed in the US attracts roughly the same number of analysts as one listed at home. But in Stockholm or Amsterdam or Zurich, those analysts understand the customers, the competitive dynamics, and the regulatory environment. Coverage depth matters less than coverage quality.

The 2026 pipeline suggests the shift is real. Revolut has reported €5.2bn in revenue and €2bn in profit for 2025, and is preparing what could become one of the decade’s largest tech IPOs, at a valuation currently discussed around €86bn. The venue remains open; the scale is no longer in question. Bolt and Raisin are both looking at European options. Visma, valued at €19bn, chose London for its listing, though the recent SaaS sell-off has pushed back the timetable. Euronext has opened its IPOready 2026 cohort with more than 160 companies from 22 countries, 69% of them in technology.

European exchanges have never lacked capital. What they lacked was a run of IPOs demonstrating that listing here is a competitive choice, not a fallback. That argument is now being made, not in a prospectus or a policy paper, but in the order books.