Embracing Retail – January 2026

For those of a certain vintage who can remember it, this year marks the 40th anniversary of the (then) iconic “Tell Sid” advertising campaign which ran in tandem with the privatisation of British Gas. In this, people urged each other to let Sid know he could buy shares at “affordable” prices and its success led to a new wave of first-time shareholders in the UK.

Many of us look at the market right now and regard quite a lot of shares out there as in the affordable bracket but forty years on from Sid, where is the next wave of new retail shareholders going to come from?