It may not feel like it, given the extremity of market volatility driven by macroeconomic fears for most of this year, but stock prices are not actually doing that badly. Provided you're prepared to take a rather long-term view, that is.

This graphic charts the growth of the UK's blue-chip stock index, the FTSE 100, from the period leading up to the Big Bang, a series of seismic changes to the UK financial markets landscape that heralded deregulation and the move to electronic trading, and paved the way forward for London as a global financial centre.