Al-Abadi, Ali, ETP Product Manager and Alex Watkins, ETP Business Development Lead, at the London Stock Exchange have written that 2025 was a milestone year.
“The London Stock Exchange (LSE) celebrated 25 years since the first ETP listing in the UK, celebrating a quarter-century of innovation and growth.
“From humble beginnings in 2000 to today’s trillion-pound market, the journey has been remarkable. The year set new highs for trading volumes, listings and product development.”
2025 was a record year for ETP trading on the LSE, with the order book seeing GBP238.4 billion in ETP value traded, marking a 38 per cent year-on-year increase.”
The pair writes that this is reflected in the share of European On-venue trading, which reached a record 11 per cent. “We see a similar upward trend in Europe, with the total ETP trading exceeding EUR2.9 trillion in 2025, accounting for 18 per cent of total European value traded (source: xyt).
The pair writes that on-book trading volumes have benefitted from industry volatility and from efforts to boost on-book activity. Increased participation from retail and proprietary trading firms also supported this growth, they say.
2025 also set new records for listings, reinforcing the LSE’s position as a leading European venue, the pair writes, listing 398 new listings which were added during the year, bringing the total to 2,126 ETFs and 499 ETCs/ETNs, a combined 2,645 listings.
“The overseas fund regime streamlined the listing process for both new and existing issuers, and white-label platforms continue to attract asset managers to our market.
“Today, more than 80 ETP issuers are active on the LSE. 23 debut asset managers also joined the market in 2025, with 19 launching active ETFs. Meanwhile active ETFs gained significant traction with existing issuers, and in total we saw 145 new active ETFs listed here.”
A major milestone in 2025 was the lifting of the retail ban for crypto ETNs. The team writes that 20 crypto ETNs are now listed on the LSE, covering 33 currency lines and nine asset management groups, with more expected to follow. Following the change, average daily value traded rose by 500 per cent, reflecting the strong retail appetite for digital assets, the pair says.
“In June, we introduced a standardised methodology for Exchange Market Size (EMS) setting. This new methodology targets 10 per cent of a symbols Average Daily Volume Traded to be the minimum number of shares that a registered Market Maker can quote on our orderbook, subject to a lower and upper bound of GBP5k and GBP50k, respectively. As a result of this change, average spreads across ETPs decreased by 7 per cent.
“In December, we went live with an upgrade to our trading system, which doubled our capacity for ETPs. Since implementation, latency metrics have improved significantly, with an average 80 per cent decrease in latency times for trading members, based on LSE internal data modelling. This change has strategically positioned the LSE to be able to support a strong listing pipeline and onboarding of new liquidity providers, while enhancing the trading efficiency for members.
“We also continued to focus on our retail offering and introduced the Retail Broker Scheme, which provides brokers sending retail flow to the LSE orderbook with free trading, clearing, connectivity and market data. The policy has saved brokers sending eligible retail flow to the LSE more than £1 million in 2025 and will continue to reduce costs for brokers serving retail customers on our order book.”
The team writes that with record trading volumes, record listings and new asset classes opening up, the exchange is well placed to expand and deepen its partnerships in 2026.
“As innovation continues, the ETP market is well positioned to support greater growth in the years ahead,” the pair writes and January figures reveal that the exchange enjoyed four out of five of its highest ever trading days with GBP1.6 billion ADVT for ETPs.
