The conversation, which mainly covered the UK market, found speakers fairly pensive. On a three-year view the FTSE 250 index has seen significant outperformance as money from the UK, Europe and the US flooded in looking for growth opportunities. That was the story for much of the first half of this year as investors chased the market up, arguably beyond the valuation safe zone in some cases. But this year has also seen a fair amount of volatility and the index fell almost 14% between its highs o

IFR: Steven, if you look at the UK IPO market this year, it’s been quite busy. If you were to do a segmentation of IPOs by deal size and then look at the underwriters on those, there is a very clear distinction. Effectively there are two markets out there. There is the market for the US$100m equivalent plus deals, where you see the global firms on the docket. Sub-US$100m it morphs quite dramatically into a cabal of UK midcap brokers. I guess there are some obvious reasons for some of that but I

IFR: Looking at European IPO activity, we’ve seen 30 or 40 deals above US$500m equivalent, which includes the bank recaps and the right issues. But half of the volume raised has been in the midcap segment. Bosco: is there a correlation between what you cover and IPO activity? Do they go in synch? Bosco Ojeda, UBS: They do because there is a confluence of interest between investors, banks and companies. An important factor is that for a number of years there was not much activity in European IPOs

IFR: Good afternoon and welcome to this IFR roundtable on Investing in Small and Midcap Equities. As a starting point for our conversation, it would probably be useful to define what we mean. Bosco: in your equities universe, how do you define Midcaps? Bosco Ojeda, UBS: Anything below €5bn would classify as a European midcap; similar to the US market, which is anything below US$5bn. But I have to say that this distinction can be variable in the universe of investors. There is quite a lot of flex

James Burt Barclays James Burt is a director of UK mid and small Cap equity sales at Barclays, based in London. He joined Barclays in 2011 to help build out the UK mid and small cap product. Prior to this, he worked at Cazenove for eight years, starting in pan-European all-cap sales before specialising in small cap. Steven Fine Peel Hunt Steven Fine became managing partner and head of equities at Peel Hunt in 2006. He was previously a founder member of D.E. Shaw Securities, which later became th