When the FTSE Aim All-Share index last month fell below the 1,000 mark at which it started in 1995, the sound was lost among the louder market crashes elsewhere.
Yet the breach, on January 21, was significant. It was the first time the main index of London's junior market had dropped below 1,000 since the bursting of the dotcom bubble.
It also looks like marking the beginning of the third period of the index remaining below 1,000 for a significant time.
The first came in 1998, just before it soared to its all-time high of 2924 in the dotcom boom. The rapid increase of that dizzying era was matched by an almost equally precipitous fall.
It passed back below 1,000 in September 2001, touching its nadir of 542 in the spring of 2003. It took until January 2005 before it climbed back above 1,000 and any gains since have been short-lived.
Does this mean that as Aim approaches its teenage years, its best days are already behind it and senescence beckons?
Certainly, taken as a whole, Aim appears far from vibrant. Not only has its main index generated little capital growth but, as a market for small and often young companies, it does not generate much cash either. The Aim All-Share yields just 0.64 per cent - only a minority of Aim companies pay a dividend at all - against 3.66 per cent for the FTSE 100 index or 2.51 per cent for the FTSE SmallCap index.
The problem is that in more than 12 years the market has changed out of all recognition.
Having begun with just 10 companies, none of which would stir the memories of today's investors, it now consists of 1,700 companies all performing very differently.
Almost 60 per cent of stocks listed on Aim in 2003 have since underperformed the market, some of them real horrors in which investors lost everything.
Yet, there have also been stars. Since Aim's 2003 low-point, these have included Asos, the online fashion group (up more than 5,000 per cent); Indigovision, the digital signage company (up 2,400 per cent); and Camec, the mining company run by ex-cricketer Phil Edmonds (up 1,600 per cent).
Moreover, the amount of money raised in primary and secondary issues on Aim has soared from just £2bn in 2003 to more than £16bn last year in primary and secondary issues. If it is the case that Aim is a stock-picker's market, some people are clearly prepared to hunt and place some bets.
Aim's coming of age was in the year 2000, when the number of new technology companies seeking a listing forced the institutions - which initially refused to invest in the junior market - to revise their opinions.
By the time of Aim's 10th birthday in June 2005 it had grown to list more than 1,200 companies. It had survived the dotcom crash by offering a broad spread of companies that gave fund managers somewhere else to turn apart from new technology.
Over the past three or four years Aim has proved its adaptability again by attracting an increasing number of companies from overseas. About 500 of the companies now listed on Aim, or almost a third, are based abroad in 70 different countries.
In fact it can almost be regarded as two separate markets. The London Stock Exchange, which owns Aim, tacitly admitted as much when it launched in May 2005 two new indices - the Aim 50, which takes in the top 50 UK companies, and the Aim 100, which comprises the top 100 companies, including those from overseas.
Neither has proved particularly useful although last year's figures did show that the UK-only index did not hold up as well as the bigger Aim 100. Dawnay Day, the broker, has come up with an Aim Overseas 100 index and an Aim UK 100 index, which show more clearly how the overseas companies - which have a bigger market capitalisation - have been outperforming the UK companies.
However, the underperformance of UK small caps has not been confined to Aim. The Hoare Govett Smaller Companies Index, which covers the bottom 10 per cent of the full list by value and is rebalanced at the end of every year, last month showed that after outperfoming the large caps for four years, the small caps fell behind in 2007.
Rubbing salt in the wound, Professor Elroy Dimson of London Business School, and one of the compilers of the index, also said the start of this year had been the worst in the 21-year history of the HGSC index.
Andy Crossley, fund manager at Invesco Perpetual, believes there is a crisis of funding for small-cap companies in the UK. Until 2000 the amount of money going into small cap investment trusts had been steadily increasing for 20 years. Since then every quarter has seen more money taken out than invested.
At the same time changes in the UK pensions and life assurance industries have led to a much reduced pool of money available for investing in smaller companies.
Other fund managers agree. "Fund raising for UK micro-caps has become extremely difficult and has every prospect of remaining so," says Henrietta Marsh of Isis. But the upside is that the prices for some Aim shares "are daft - they are so low".
Bob Morton, a serial backer of Aim companies, says all investors are very wary of small caps at the moment wherever they are listed.
Poor sentiment, the expectation of a recession and further fall-out from the credit crunch will all take some time to go through the system, he believes.
But while he is predicting a poor year for equities, "for anyone who is a long-term investor, it's a cracking time to invest".
Meanwhile, companies are still coming to the market, albeit not so many.
Kentz, an engineering contractor specialising in the resources sector, this week became the eighth to float on Aim so far this year. In the same period last year 13 companies joined.
Evolution Securities, which acted as nomad (nominated adviser) to Kentz, is very positive after bringing five companies to market in the last few months.
"Our message is that the London market is open for business," says Andrew Umbers, Evolution Securities chief executive. He also says some of the institutions backing Kentz have not invested in an Aim company before.
Although it had to settle for less than it wanted, Kentz was a big flotation, pulling in £67m from the sale of new and existing shares.
The company has also been around a long time, is based in Ireland, operates all over the world, and has a market capitalisation of £145m - hardly the type of dynamic start-up UK company for which Aim was created.
But then many of the more interesting companies hoping to join Aim are coming from overseas.
One that began its roadshows this week is Mortice, which is planning to be the first Indian property and facilities management group to list on the junior market. The company is hoping to raise $25m (£12.8m), but not only in London. It is also visiting potential investors in Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Not everything that comes from overseas sticks.
A couple of years ago several spacs - as special acquisition vehicles are known in the US - were listed on Aim. While there has not been a spac launched in London for some time, this week Deutsche Bank (NYSE:DB) and Citigroup (NYSE:C) raised EU600m (£447m) on Euronext in Amsterdam for Liberty International Acquisition.
Quentin Nason of Deutsche Bank said Liberty was the second spac to arrive on Euronext, describing it as a "big bang moment". Spacs - which are big sources of fund raising in the US - had originally come to Aim because it offered a much faster route to completion and a more flexible environment than the US. But the technical, regulatory and legal offer from Euronext, coupled with the ability to do bigger deals, would now prove more attractive to US investors.
Spacs were never mainstream Aim business, but their arrival and disappearance illustrate how quickly things can change on a market that is still evolving.
But as Aim matures, it faces new challenges.
It has always had to find a delicate balance between a light regulatory touch and the need to maintain its reputation, but in the last year the rules governing the market have been tightened with an inevitable impact on costs.
And its very success means that competitors are constantly looking for a way to muscle in. As the size of companies on Aim has grown - 15 of them are worth more than £500m and three are worth more than £1bn - Plus Markets has reestablished itself at the micro end of the market. In its sights are the 500 Aim companies with a market capitalisation of less than £10m.
Now UK small-cap plc is having a tough time and it is too early to tell whether Aim's increased interest in attracting companies from abroad is taking the market in the right direction. Many will heave a sigh of relief when the Aim All-Share climbs back through 1000 - but that might be several months away.
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