Keeping our own plans to refresh the IC to celebrate our 160th birthday on track has demanded blood, sweat and tears from the team. Yet it is somewhat fitting for a magazine that has seen so much change and upheaval in its history that this anniversary has been marked by an event that has had such a profound effect, not just on our lives but the market too. That the publication has been around so long means that in the back of our minds we are always well aware, even when things seem bleakest, that the world has suffered much worse and that life will get better.
While the Investors’ Chronicle has learned many lessons from 160 years of world-changing events, the pandemic has compressed what feels like a century and a half of lessons into less than a year. It has reminded us of the ingenuity of humankind; we have watched companies’ reconfigure – overnight – their businesses for new ways of working, and now wonder whether they will ever return to former practices. The efforts of PrimaryBid – our first guest columnist – have in a stroke altered the landscape for private investors; it is arguably the biggest leap in shareholder democracy since the invention of the investment trust a few years after the IC began writing. The City’s institutional fortress has been breached.