Mercantile bull points
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Outperformed peers in a difficult sector
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Well placed to benefit from mid-cap revival
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Good dividend growth record
With US stocks suffering a rare setback, the march of the UK-listed blue-chip has been hard to ignore. The FTSE 100 has delivered a total return of almost 16 per cent so far in 2025 and broken new record highs. On a five-year basis it is only slightly behind the S&P 500, in sterling terms.
And yet that recovery hasn’t fully fed into all parts of the UK market. The FTSE 250 has returned a strong but much less impressive total return of 7 per cent in 2025 and notably lags its blue-chip equivalent, and most major markets, over the past half-decade.