The AIM market has shown a decent level of recovery since it was below 400 earlier in the year and is now offering some comfort to investors that have stuck with AIM shares in recent volatile markets.

The AIM All-Share Index ended May at 524.65 up 9.4per cent on where it was the previous month.

There are signs that confidence is returning to AIM and companies releasing positive results have seen their share price respond accordingly.

Until recently results released by a company, regardless of their nature, tended to lead to their share price falling.

Latest statistics from the London Stock Exchange indicate that appetite for investing in AIM is returning.

A total of £585.8m was raised in new and secondary funds in May, up from £419.9m in May last year which make last month the best for fund raising since June last year when a total of £1bn was raised.

The May statistics also show that the number of companies that delisted from AIM over the period has fallen.

In March, which was one of the worst months, 37 companies left the junior market but the number fell to 26 in April and then again to 19 in May.

June has started well with news of two companies raising money through placings with their institutional investors.

Goal Soccer Centres, which operates 32 five-a-side football centres across the UK, successfully raised £11m at 165p a share which discounted the closing share price before the deal was announced by only 7per cent. The money raised will be used to open a further 15 centres.

The second, Proximagen Neuroscience, a drug company that specialises in neuro-degenerative diseases, announced last week that it was raising £50m through a placing at 140p a share in order to acquire and develop more drug programmes and at the same time making Proximagen one of the UK’s best capitalised biopharmaceutical companies.

It is good to see that there is certain level of confidence returning to AIM and that patient investors will hopefully begin to see recovery in the stocks that they hold. At the same time new investors, if picking stocks wisely, could see a considerable gain in their investment if the market carries on in the same direction.