The magical year of Piazza Affari: it beats every record and returns to the highest since 2001. Here’s what happened

After a 31.5% jump in prices since the beginning of the year and a strong closing (+1.14%) during the last session of 2025, the Italian Stock Exchange archives one of the best years in its history with a boom in prices that has been unprecedented since 2000, 25 years ago. The exploit is memorable because the main index, the Ftse Mib, goes from around 34 thousand points in 2024 – when the Milanese price list had recorded a not insignificant performance of 12.6% – to almost 45 thousand points currently. Numbers which translated into macroeconomic quantities, according to the end-of-year calculations of the Italian Stock Exchange, imply that the overall capitalization of Piazza Affari as of December 29th reached 1,042 billion euros, a value equal to 47.2% of GDP. Consider that Wall Street is worth 45% of US GDP. Even from this point of view, the growth is impressive, especially since in the already excellent 2024 the Milanese stock market was worth an aggregate of 811 billion at the end of the year, a capitalization at the time equal to 38% of GDP.

The samples of the price list

It was above all the banking sector that pushed prices upwards. Two of the most important titles, Intesa Sanpaolo and Unicredit achieved a performance of 53.3% and 84.1% respectively. However, the 5 champions of Piazza Affari were Fincantieri (+141%), Tim (+108.4%), Popolare di Sondrio (+104.5%), Iveco (+101%) and Leonardo (+89.6%).

Freshmen and Opa

It should be noted that from the point of view of the number of listed companies, things have not gone so well. Because if it is true that in 2025 there were 21 new admissions to Euronext Growth Milan, the segment of small high-growth companies, during the year 29 companies left the list (even if big names such as Edison and Nextchem are expected to return in 2026). As many as 11 companies left the main market, which brings the number of listed companies to 411 stocks. In detail: 199 companies are traded on Euronext Milan, and 212 on Euronext Growth Milan. Thanks to the new registrations, however, the collection was approximately 124 million euros. In addition to the new admissions, there were 13 capital increase operations under option, for a total amount of 1.5 billion euros. Finally, in 2025, the takeover bids reached the total number of 23, for a value of approximately 2.2 billion euros.

International investors

But perhaps the most important qualitative fact is that this year the Italian stock exchange has entered the sights of international investors and not just domestic savers. This evolution is signaled, among other things, by the increase in trade, which reached a daily average of 3.5 billion euros, an increase of 31.1% compared to 2024, with an average of 370 thousand daily contracts (+22.8%) This is the highest daily average turnover since the 2007-2008 financial crisis. And the most traded stock was Unicredit, a bank with a global shareholder base, with over 5 million contracts for a total of over 91 billion euros.

January 1, 2026

© ALL RIGHTS RESERVED